Death by PowerPoint vs. Writing to Learn

A recent article in the New York Times examines how PowerPoint has affected the way strategy is set and decisions are made in the US military.

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. 

A running joke, maybe, but some of the impacts aren't so funny.

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, [likened] 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.”

...

Commanders say that behind all the PowerPoint jokes are serious concerns that the program stifles discussion, critical thinking and thoughtful decision-making.

I agree with the unnamed commanders and think that this issue has implications for local government, too.

Here, I think, is the crux of the problem: PowerPoint isn't just used to facilitate discussions of strategy, but rather PowerPoint presentations have become the major strategy documents. And that is a problem because:

Commanders say that the slides impart less information than a five-page paper can hold, and that they relieve the briefer of the need to polish writing to convey an analytic, persuasive point. 

Too often we think of writing as something that occurs after we learn - after our ideas have been developed. We develop a military strategy and then we write it down to present to others. We develop a plan for rolling out a new public service and then we write it down. Actually though, we learn about things by writing about them. William Zinsser makes this point in Writing to Learn.

Have you ever said to yourself, "I know what I want to say, but I don't know how to say it."? We are lying to ourselves. When I say that, my real problem is that I don't know what I want to say, because I haven't learned enough yet. I've got some vaguely formed idea churning around in my head that I think is more complete than it really is. Trying to put it on paper reveals how poorly developed it is. That revelation forces me to think a little longer and a little harder and to maybe go back and study the issue some more because I haven't learned enough yet. Clear writing is clear thinking. You can't have one without the other.

So, if commanders are developing their strategies in outline form, which is really all that a PowerPoint presentation is, without ever having to write down what they are thinking, then they are circumventing  an important part of the process.

And if the strategy is poorly developed, then what about the execution?

As recounted in the book “Fiasco” by Thomas E. Ricks (Penguin Press, 2006), Lt. Gen. David D. McKiernan, who led the allied ground forces in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, grew frustrated when he could not get Gen. Tommy R. Franks ... to issue orders that stated explicitly how he wanted the invasion conducted, and why. Instead, General Franks just passed on to General McKiernan the vague PowerPoint slides that he had already shown to Donald H. Rumsfeld, the defense secretary at the time. (Emphasis mine - cdt)

Yikes!

So, let's take this back to something a little more on topic for this blog. I've been reading If We Can Put a Man on the Moon: Getting Big Things Done in Government, by Eggers and O'Leary. They examine why government programs fail and lay out a model of the process of how things get accomplished in government:

• The undertaking must start with a good idea.
• The idea must be given specifics, often in the form of legislation, that become an implementable design.
• The design must win approval, as when a bill becomes a law, signaling a moment of democratic commitment.
• There must be competent implementation.
• The initiative must generate desired results (Eggers and O'Leary 2009, p. 10).

A failure in any of these steps can lead to failure of the project. They examine seven traps we fall into that lead us to fail in this process.

I'm not far into the book. I've read the chapter on ideas and begun the chapter on design.

In the idea stage, we are prone to confirmation bias in which we only see what we want to see. Our ideas about public policy are informed by our conception of how the world works and how government works. Our conception may be more or less accurate. We run into trouble when we readily accept evidence that we are correct, but ignore evidence that we are wrong.

So, our projects may fail because we had a faulty idea from the start. When we are forced to put our ideas in writing, then we are more likely to examine our evidence. Even if we do not, then our idea is in a form that is easier for others to analyze and critique. In other words, written ideas and plans are a defense against confirmation bias. When we use a tool like PowerPoint, not to present our ideas and plans, but to develop them, we lose the benefits that come from writing to learn.

I wonder how many failures of local government implementation have their roots in PowerPoint or other stunted forms of idea and plan development?