Banning PowerPoint Reveals Flawed Communication

CIO — DID YOU READ THE RECENT ARTICLE on the Darwin magazine website, "Is PowerPoint Too Dumb for Words?" (see www.darwinmag.com/connect/opinion/column_index.html). It cleverly depicts the view that extensive use of PowerPoint presentations is "dumbing down" our thinking, effectively reducing our thoughts and communications to bullet points. This viewpoint brought back a vivid memory for me. As CIO for a global company a few years back, I actually banned PowerPoint presentations in my team for a while. My reasons weren’t quite as arch and philosophical as those presented in that article, but they were on a similar track. I simply got bored watching the darn things! Every presentation, whether generated inside the company or outside, looked exactly the same, had similar depth (which is to say, none) and was so homogeneous that I could have delivered it from memory without ever having seen it before.

I didn’t blame the whole thing on the PowerPoint tool itself. Microsoft makes a fine product, and the same thing could have happened if we all used Freelance or Visio. The problem was that our attention span had become so limited that our level of conversation had degenerated to this bullet point way of talking and thinking. We were presenting to each other, not talking with each other. We didn’t know how to engage people in other ways, so we took the few minutes we got and gave them the Reader’s Digest version of the idea we wanted to convey.

The example that sticks most clearly in my mind is a presentation about a new data center that was being planned in one of our locations. The team displayed a laudable command of the new features of PowerPoint, and they delivered a beautiful pitch with animation, sound and a touch-sensitive wide screen display. The problem was that the presentation didn’t say anything about the data center project that I couldn’t have said about any other data center project. The team members told me it would have security, fire suppression and central monitoring?things every data center has. What they didn’t do was talk to me about their project so that I could understand what they were really doing and why, so I asked for another meeting without the fancy pitch?a chance to just talk.

It’s a good thing I did, because I heard a much different story without all the pyrotechnics. One thing I learned in conversation was that we were building the data center over a lab that built potentially explosive fuel cells. This didn’t sound like a good idea to me, so we quickly changed the location plan. Another important thing I learned was that my team had a great deal of pride and vision in their view of data center operations. They weren’t just thinking about a room; they were envisioning a major change in how we ran computer operations in that region of the world. Once we ironed out the wrinkles in the project, we used their vision as the template for operations in other regions. Again, their bulleted presentation had deprived me of this valuable insight and the recognition they deserved for developing it.

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