CommLog

From time to time, we encounter small groups of executives sitting at a conference table, with a laptop and an LCD projector, developing a PowerPoint presentation. They aren’t developing a presentation to communicate the results of a planning and decision-making process that they’ve already completed. Instead, the act of developing and refining a PowerPoint presentation has become their surrogate planning and decision-making process. They’re trying to “kill two birds with one stone” by simultaneously crafting decisions and the vehicle for communicating those decisions. This approach is especially common in IT organizations, and theoretically, it has merits; in particular, it shows that the executives involved in the planning and decision-making process are thoughtfully anticipating the eventual need to communicate their plans and decisions. But in practice, the need to accurately capture the nuances and details of the planning and decision-making process too often produces a dense PowerPoint presentation that makes a lousy communication vehicle. Also of concern: Adopting PowerPoint as a surrogate planning and decision-making tool, a use for which PowerPoint was not designed, will in many cases constrain the quality of the plans and decisions produced. An unlikely source, former Talking Heads frontman David Byrne, has elaborated this point in his recent book, E.E.E.I. (Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information). Here are excerpts from a recent Newsweek interview:

You mention in the book that, for as much as it looks like an inanimate neutral thing, the PowerPoint software is not a neutral tool. How is it biased? Well, neither is any piece of software or operating system. They all make assumptions about what you want to do with them and what kind of use you’re going to put them to, and therefore how you lead your life and what’s important to you. And it comes down to really simple things. Like in address books, it has a slot for your parents and your house and your spouse. That makes assumptions about how you live--and most of them are absolutely true--but what I’m talking about is stuff that’s not visible. It’s about how the architecture of the software makes assumptions about how you do things. This is going to sound high-falutin’, but it’s in the same way that Wittgenstein would say that the limits of our thought are the limits of our language. What we can say, what we can verbalize or write, determines what we can think. … I think there’s a lot of people in the IT community who actually will get this, not only because they work with PowerPoint, but because the whole idea that you work with programs and applications and software and it guides you in a certain kind of thinking.