Editor's note: From time to time we ask experts in various fields for their opinions on the impact of PowerPoint in organizations, and what can be done to resolve the problems associated with it.
Is PowerPoint Toxic to Good Government?
By Paul Byron PattakFor 25 years, I have worked either as an employee for, or as a consultant to, the United States Government. I have also served as a consultant to several government commissions. Over the years, I have learned a few things about how information is presented within government environments. While these observations do not apply to every office or every commission all the time, I think they illustrate some interesting and disturbing trends that make government less effective for all of us, including:
A sense of false security. A PowerPoint presentation makes for an actual “deliverable” in the world of government. Thus, the meeting or briefing to present the PowerPoint slides becomes a definable event that “answers the mail,” and can fulfill an organizational obligation to produce something – anything. The presenting organization can then move on to other business in good conscience.
Obfuscation. PowerPoint presentations can also be ambiguous, and therefore avoid any implied or actual commitments to action or to the facts. Concurrently, PowerPoint is also useful when an enterprise does not want to share much useful information with another office or agency. It is hard to pin people down on this when their reply is, “What do you want? I gave the briefing!”
Lack of a "paper trail”. PowerPoint slides themselves can become the “minutes” of an event, with a corresponding loss of detail and clarity of who said what and when. Without such proper documentation, oftentimes the agreements reached or decisions made, remain fuzzy in the memory of attendees – and later disagreements are difficult to resolve. In certain organizational cultures this is a distinct bureaucratic advantage since the slides can be designed to not leave much of a trail.
Over-simplification. It is self-evident, but PowerPoint also becomes a crutch to avoid doing the real work that needs to be done – detailed written communications that address the complexities of issues. And, most of the issues that government is dealing with today are all incredibly complicated and multi-domain in scope. Even when the complex analyses are done – they are often summarized and presented in PowerPoint and many findings are over-simplified.
Lack of connection to performance metrics. Senior government and military officials do not seem to like PowerPoint presentations much – yet they do not say this often enough to their subordinates, their contractors and their constituency organizations. If presenters’ promotions, paychecks and careers were truly dependent on better presentations, they would do better. This does not apply to coherent and interesting imagery, but rather to the bullet-point approach to information and related ills.
Loss of intellectual assets. Without the accompanying text, PowerPoint slides make poor archival resources, and thus deprive future students, historians, officials and citizens of valuable knowledge that may have been created – often at considerable cost. I have worked with several government commissions on their archiving, and can personally attest to this. In some cases, the presenters had not originally submitted the accompanying text because they did not think the commission would be interested in the words! Imagine students in the 24th Century reviewing incomplete PowerPoint slides compared to our reviewing the works of Newton and Galileo.
Too much glitz. Finally, PowerPoint makes it way too easy to use gee-whiz animation and audio to overpower, obscure or otherwise skew the presentation of facts. While these presentations are often entertaining, the audience tends to remember the glitz and not the content. In one presentation I attended several years ago, I have forgotten all the content and the key messages of the speaker, but I do remember the musical score was from “Flight of the Valkyries” and that the audio failed the first two times that the speaker powered up the presentation.
PowerPoint did not create all these problems any more than Microsoft Outlook created get-rich-quick scams on the Internet. PowerPoint did, however, facilitate the packaging and distribution of a mindset that diminishes clear communication and dilutes the dissemination of knowledge.
I feel that the best solution to the problem is for the recipients of information, whether they be senior officials or seminar audiences or individual citizens, to simply demand better from the presenters. And it has to be done frequently and vigorously until the prevailing mindsets behind the use (and misuse) of PowerPoint are overcome for the better. In every endeavor where we tolerate mediocrity, our reward is more mediocrity – and visual communications are no exception.
Real change takes vision, resources, political will and bureaucratic savvy to change what is wrong. The bookshelves of Washington, D.C. groan under the weight of government offices and government commissions whose recommendations and advice have gone unheeded by those officials who can make a difference – and improving presentations is only a small but necessary part of the solution.
Personally, I am embarrassed by all the presentations I have given over the years that upon reflection were poorly designed, poorly executed or reflective of intellectual sloppiness and laziness – although many of them looked really cool. I have also been a party at various times to each of the PowerPoint sins listed above – and can attest to the ease in which they can be committed under organizational pressures and within certain bureaucratic cultures.
There is a clear choice to be made however. If we so choose, communicating clearly and truthfully is a better way to live and to do business – by any standard or metric.
Paul Byron Pattak is co-founder of the Covington Strategy Group, LLC, a consulting firm in Washington, DC. He provides policy advice to government clients, and also advises corporate clients on doing business with the U.S. Government. He is also a frequent speaker and author on public policy issues. Pattak can be reached at pattak@covingtonstrategygroup.com.
© 2004 Paul Byron Pattak – All rights reserved.
Cliff Atkinson is an acclaimed writer, popular keynote speaker, and a consultant to leading attorneys and Fortune 500 companies. He designed the presentations that helped persuade a jury to award a $253 million verdict to the plaintiff in the nation's first Vioxx trial in 2005, which Fortune magazine called "frighteningly powerful." Cliff’s book Beyond Bullet Points (Microsoft Press, 2005) is an Amazon.com bestseller that expands on a communications approach he has taught at many of the country's top corporations, advertising agencies, law firms, government agencies and business schools.© 2004-2006 Cliff Atkinson
