Why PowerPoint makes us stupid

Anyone who has suffered the intellectual indignity of PowerPoint knows the feeling. Slide upon slide of empty bullet points and massaged numbers, accompanied by garish images, twirling icons fading in and out of view. The "death by PowerPoint" hours spent in conference rooms witnessing a presentation padded out to the allotted time as supposed evidence of work.

Young management consultants do almost nothing but prepare decks of PowerPoint slides for their bosses to use to bludgeon clients into corporate re-engineering. But what's simply a waste of time and money in the corporate world becomes even more dangerous when applied to, say, fighting the war on terror. The US military has just launched a rearguard action against a PowerPoint culture which is said to be choking off clear thinking and planning.

A PowerPoint slide designed to show the complexity of America's military strategy in Afghanistan was first shown in Kabul last year to senior generals but has since become an online joke. On first seeing it, General Stanley McChrystal, the leader of US forces in Afghanistan, remarked: "When we understand that slide, we'll have won the war."

The New York Times recently quoted one general saying "PowerPoint makes us stupid", while another said the software is "dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control. Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable."

The main arguments against PowerPoint are that it relieves the presenter of the need to deliver analytic argument. Charts are often built with aesthetic rather than factual considerations in mind. The military even joke that the best use of it is in numbing reporters into submission. They call the style of these presentations "hypnotising chickens".

Edward Tufte, a Yale professor recently hired by President Obama to improve how the White House presents information graphically, is one of PowerPoint's greatest foes. He has modified Lord Acton's remark about the corrosive effect of power, to say "Power Corrupts. PowerPoint Corrupts Absolutely."
In an essay on the subject, Tufte wrote: "Imagine a widely used and expensive prescription drug that promised to make us beautiful but didn't. Instead the drug had frequent, serious side-effects: It induced stupidity, turned everyone into bores, wasted time, and degraded the quality and credibility of communication. These side-effects would rightly lead to a worldwide product recall."

PowerPoint presents information in short, sequential bites, which inhibits cross-referencing. Compare that with a few rich tables of numerical data supplemented by a well-written analysis, which can then provide the basis for a discussion. The latter takes less time to absorb but requires the full involvement of the reader and is less likely to lead to facts being moulded to the format.

As Tufte puts it: "The PowerPoint style routinely disrupts and dominates, and trivialises content. Thus PowerPoint presentations too often resemble a school play — very loud, very simple."

Not that it doesn't have its uses. PowerPoint is best used in delivering simple information but should be avoided as a means of presenting the argument for a decision. Professors can use PowerPoint to provide an outline of a lecture, which they then fill in orally.

The US military found gulfs between what people thought they had agreed to and what they actually decided on. An essay titled Dumb-Dumb Bullets published last year by an ex-US Marine colonel said PowerPoint allowed for vague statements such as "accelerate the introduction of new weapons", which lead to nods around the room without specifying when, by whom and of what nature. The planning for the Iraq war was apparently done heavily in PowerPoint.