Beware of PowerPoint

For anyone who has had to sit through a dreadful PowerPoint presentation, read this New York Times cover story from last month. Now not only can PowerPoint be dangerously boring, it can also be just plain dangerous:

We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint

A PowerPoint diagram meant to portray the complexity of American strategy in Afghanistan certainly succeeded in that aim.

By ELISABETH BUMILLER

Published: April 26, 2010

WASHINGTON — Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the leader of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, was shown a PowerPoint slide in Kabul last summer that was meant to portray the complexity of American military strategy, but looked more like a bowl of spaghetti.

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Pool photo by Jim Watson

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, center, in Kabul in March. He gets PowerPoint printouts the night before staff meetings.

“When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war,” General McChrystal dryly remarked, one of his advisers recalled, as the room erupted in laughter.

The slide has since bounced around the Internet as an example of a military tool that has spun out of control. Like an insurgency, PowerPoint has crept into the daily lives of military commanders and reached the level of near obsession. The amount of time expended on PowerPoint, the Microsoft presentation program of computer-generated charts, graphs and bullet points, has made it a running joke in the Pentagon and in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“PowerPoint makes us stupid,” Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander, said this month at a military conference in North Carolina. (He spoke without PowerPoint.) Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster, who banned PowerPoint presentations when he led the successful effort to secure the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar in 2005, followed up at the same conference by likening PowerPoint to an internal threat.

“It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control,” General McMaster said in a telephone interview afterward. “Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable."

From the Green Room: Before deciding to use or not use PowerPoint (and I generally recommend the latter) first figure out exactly what you want to communicate. Don't let slick slides substitute for clear thinking and careful analysis.

Then, if certain images will help you make your point, by all means show them on a screen. Just make certain your PowerPoint presentation never overshadows...you!

The Surprising Power of Surprise

It's no surprise that including the unexpected in your presentation is an excellent way to keep your audience engaged.

What may be more surprising however, is that surprises actually help your listeners retain information.

Check out this University of Cambridge study:

Because they are hard to forget, surprises can help us learn.

Now scientists have identified a part of the brain that may be involved in learning from surprises. A team led by Dr. Paul C. Fletcher at the University of Cambridge monitored the brain activity in a group of volunteers who were participating in a simulation exercise.

The participants pretended to work at drug companies and were asked to predict whether a particular fictitious drug would trigger a particular fictitious syndrome.

In the early phase of the study, when the participants were not familiar with the effects of the various drugs, imaging tests detected high levels of activity in this part of the brain.

As the volunteers became familiar with the effects of the drugs, so that they were no longer surprised by the results, activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex declined, but later in the study, this region became more active when the participants were surprised by unexpected responses.

- Published in Nature Neuroscience, 2001

From the Green Room: Don't give away your message. Your audience will be much more likely to remember it if it takes them by surprise.