 | Level: Introductory Philippe Kruchten (pbk@ece.ubc.ca), Staff, University of British Columbia
30 Jan 2004 from The Rational Edge: Personal and sometime humorous, this review explores Tufte's contention that PowerPoint presentations have degraded business communication, depriving audiences of both the content and context necessary for real understanding.
by Edward R. Tufte
Graphics Press LLC, 2003
ISBN: 0-9613921-5-0
Cover price: US $5.00
28 pages
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Although Microsoft PowerPoint has become a ubiquitous tool for presentations,
it has its limitations. Unfortunately, many people do not recognize them.
A couple of months ago, I was reviewing the conclusions of a study whose
results came to me as a PowerPoint (PP) file. As I began exchanging emails
with the author -- challenging bullets, slides, and assertions; asking
why, how, and so on -- the author kept replying, "Oh, that's
not what we meant; the slides represent just a short summary of our findings.
We do have a complete explanation, but it would not fit on the page."
However, when I said, "OK, let's dispense with the slides;
send me the report," it turned out that the slide show was the only
report. The findings were not represented in any other form.
I recently encountered another case of over-dependency on PowerPoint
in another context. I was asked to prepare a few slides explaining why
my group needs more staff and funding, but I found I was unable to clearly
articulate my reasoning through a set of bulleted points on a slide. So
instead I provided six pages of text. The person who had made the request
was dismayed, and proceeded to "translate" my paper into a
few slides.
Clearly, substituting slides for real discourse has become a widespread
practice in many organizations. And this has devastated our ability to
communicate ideas accurately and completely. As a lecturer, over the years
I've kept telling the people I've trained, "The slides
are not the course; they are only there to help you track the flow of
this presentation, and occasionally to help me illustrate a point."
I emphasize that PowerPoint slides can support a presentation effectively,
but they are no substitute for the in-depth information a presenter should
deliver. "If you are not listening to my presentation, then seeing
the slides in isolation will be of little value," I remind them.
In The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint, Edward Tufte, Professor
Emeritus at Yale and renowned author of The Visual Display of Quantitative
Information, articulates the same thoughts about the limitations of
PowerPoint.
Slideware helps speakers to outline their talks, to retrieve and show
diverse visual materials, and to communicate slides in talks, printed
reports, and on the Internet. And also to replace serious analysis with
chartjunk, overproduced layouts, cheerleader logotypes and branding,
and corny clipart. That is, PowerPointPhluff.
This point was brought home to me about a month ago, when I asked some
colleagues to review one of my PowerPoint slide shows. In their feedback,
they did not ask for more substance, but instead for "a couple of
bullets on millions of dollars of revenue pull-through," and much
more clipart to break up the text.
In fact, Tufte expresses my own frustrations with the medium so well
that I will quote heavily from his text (in italics, and sometimes boldface
for emphasis) throughout this review. If you are a frequent user or consumer
of PowerPoint presentations, I heartily recommend that you invest the
five dollars it costs to buy this wonderful pamphlet, and then study it
carefully.
One of Tufte's main points is that "PowerPoint is entirely
presenter oriented, and not content oriented nor audience oriented...The
PP slide typically shows 40 words, which is about 8 seconds worth of silent
reading material...Many true statements are too long to fit [as a
bullet on a PowerPoint slide], but this does not mean we should abbreviate
the truth to make the words fit. It means we should find a better way
to make presentations."
He goes on to explain that:
PowerPoint convenience for the speaker can be costly to both
content and audience. These costs result from the cognitive style
characteristic of the standard default PP presentations:
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Foreshortening of evidence and thought,
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Low spatial resolution,
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A deeply hierarchical single-path structure as the model for
organizing every type of content, breaking up narrative and data into
slides and minimal fragments,
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Rapid temporal sequencing of thin information rather than focused
spatial analysis,
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Conspicuous decoration and Phluff,
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A preoccupation with format not content,
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And an attitude of commercialism that turns everything into a sales
pitch.
The body of the pamphlet is organized around these seven bulleted items,
showing evidence derived from respected organizations such as NASA and
Boeing. Tufte also cites PowerPoint templates and PP guidelines issued
by the Harvard School of Public Health, referring to them as "...a
witless PowerPoint pitch on how to make a witless PowerPoint pitch."
Of the organization's "6 lines of 6 words" rule, Tufte
says, "This must be the Haiku Rule for formatting scientific lectures...The
templates do, however, emulate the format of reading primers for 6-year-olds."
And he provides some amusing evidence for the latter claim.
Pet peeve: Data distortion
Tufte, whom the New York Times has dubbed "The Leonardo
da Vinci of data," lashes out in full force on how PowerPoint presentations
distort data:
The statistical graphics generated by the PowerPoint ready-made templates
are astonishingly thin, nearly content free. In 28 books on PP presentations,
the 217 data graphics depict an average of 12 numbers each...By
leaving out the narrative between the points, the bullet outline ignores
and conceals the causal assumptions and analytic structure of the reasoning.
This is precisely why I tell my trainees that PowerPoint slides should
be used only to support a presentation, and not in isolation.
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The Gettysburg Address
in Slideware
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Like Edward Tufte, Peter Norvig laments that
PowerPoint presentations have become substitutes for substantive
discourse. To illustrate just how much can be lost through this
visual medium, Norvig decided to reduce the Gettysburg Address to
six slides.
"All I had to do was take the text of the address and break it
into pieces, making sure that I captured the main phrases of the
original, while losing all the flow, eloquence, and impact," he
explains. Two of his slides are shown below. (To find the entire
presentation, see the References at the end of this review.)
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Slide 2 of 6...
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Slide 6 of 6...
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Much of the pamphlet is dedicated to analyzing the significance of bullets
and hierarchies of bullets, as well as what Tufte calls "chartjunk"
-- the various ways in which PowerPoint templates disguise the real meaning
of data. Tufte refers to the use of these templates as "a clear sign of
statistical stupidity," but his discussion on the topic is too complex
for me to capture here in summary form. You must read the pamphlet for
yourself.
Tufte also challenges the misuse of George Miller's classic 1956
paper "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two," as the
key justification for substituting slideware for other, richer forms of
communication. Miller's thesis is that most people have the capacity
to remember approximately seven dull, unrelated pieces of data -- that
is, they can memorize nonsense if it has no more than seven components.
But as Tufte points out, rather than justifying the lists of unrelated
bulleted items we typically see on slides "...the deep point
of Miller's work is to suggest strategies, such as placing information
within a context, that help extend the reach of memory beyond tiny clumps
of data."
Tufte also warns of the inherent dangers in the business world's
increasing dependence on PowerPoint as a standard for delivering reports
and publishing information.
Again the short-run convenience for the presenter...comes at an
enormous cost to the content and the audience...As those who have flipped
through pages and pages and pages of printed-out PP slides already know,
such reports are physically thin and intellectually thin...The PP
slide format has probably the worst signal/noise ratio of any known
method of communication on paper or the computer screen...In
day-to-day practice, PP templates may improve 10 or 20% of all presentations
by organizing inept, extremely disorganized speakers at a cost of detectable
intellectual damage to 80%. For statistical data, the damage levels
approach dementia.
Interestingly, Tufte begins his pamphlet with a passage from Lou Gerstner's
book Who Says Elephants Can't Dance. The former CEO of IBM
describes his first meeting with an IBM executive after accepting the
job. The executive had prepared a slide show to brief Gerstner on the
company, but after the second slide, Gerstner turned off the projector
and said, "Let's just talk about your business." We
could all profit from his example.
References
Edward R. Tufte Web site: http://ww.edwardtufte.com
George Miller, "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some
Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information." Psychological
Review, 63 (1956), 81-87. (Posted at http://www.well.com/user/smalin/miller.html)
Peter Norvig, "The Gettysburg PowerPoint Presentation." (Posted
at http://www.norvig.com/Gettysburg/index.htm)
About the author | 
| | Philippe Kruchten is former director and general manager of the IBM Rational Software
Process Business Unit, in charge of the Rational Unified Process (RUP). He worked with Rational for thirteen years, in various functions and places: France, Sweden,
the US, and Vancouver, Canada.
Philippe's main interests right now, besides software architecture and design,
are software engineering and the development process. He is campaigning, in
Canada, for the concept of state-licensed professional software engineers.
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