Book Report: The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within
So I commit one of the mistakes Tufte describes before the first sentence, but I need to draw you in. I need to grab your attention and keep you from bouncing off to YouTube. So if you made it this far, I probably have you, so here’s the meat and potatoes.
I’ve just finished The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching out Corrupts Within on recommendation from a friend. I recently consulted with him on presentation I gave to another team within our organization. A few of his pointers were a result of his reading of CSPP. Given his excellent advice, and the inexpensive price tag of CSPP, I thought I would give it read.
Now I don’t work anywhere like NASA, the location of one of Tufte’s case studies. Nor do we deal with life and death presentations; however, instantly a correlation between us and NASA appeared as we both use PowerPoint as a substitute for a technical report or documentation. Following the Columbia disaster NASA and Boeing prepared several technical PP presentation to summarize their confidence in the safety attempting reentry. In our organization we create PP presentations when projects are initiated, information protection reviews are performed, new security policies are enacted, etc. PP is not the proper medium for such content, although I think Tufte would struggle to find a valuable topic where PP is a proper medium.
Tufte makes several points, although I’m sure if I read it again there would be several more hiding in every passage. The first item that I took away, with the help from previously mentioned advice, is that bullets destroy the continuity and quality of information. Bullets not only add noise to the screen, but fragment information in choppy, diluted, ambiguous phrases for the sole purpose of following the PP paradigm and fitting into 6 word sound bites. If the subject is important enough to get everyone in the room, more time could be spent on information rather than making it snappy and catchy.
For example:
- Bullets are noise
- Bullets are dumbed down sentences
- Bullets dumb down your content
The audience can read faster than the speaker can talk, so keeping the slides short and sweet isn’t necessary. The dilution of information into PP slides became more apparent when he illustrated it took 54 PP slides to reproduce the information on a single page of a book. To apply this to our organization, the information protection review covers several checklist items without any explanation or discussion. Just “Have you done X“? What is X? Why do I care about it? Is it really a binary value or can I complete it to some degree? I don’t know. It just says “YES or NO”. I’ve always thought it was a little odd that we used PP for documentation.
Another interesting observation was the application of Conway’s Law to PP slides. I am really interested to see if slides produced by our organization follow the same deep visual hierarchy of those at NASA.
This is probably enough rambling. CSPP is short, less than 30 pages, and you could probably read it in the time it took me to write this post. I’ll just leave you with two ideas that should come across in my next presentation. When picking the hat to wear when preparing the presentation, pick the teacher hat and not the marketing sleaze ball hat. After all, that is the point of presentations, unless you are a used car salesman. They should understand what I’m trying to say and not just go along with it.
And along the same lines, have less noise and more signal. It will make the presentation more valuable and more creditable. This may mean the PP requires an accompanying document with more detailed information and data.
The two points are symbiotic. The more substance you have in a presentation, the less need for smoke, mirrors and magic to convince whomever of whatever because there is understanding. This also leaves, not only more valuable artifacts, but resonating confidence and more retainable information.
