Effective Communication Despite PowerPoint
by Frank Grossman, FSA, FCIA
The market for enterprise risk management represents an important growth opportunity for actuaries. Gauging an organization’s exposure to diverse financial hazards, and identifying what can be done to transform that organization’s risk silhouette—and at what cost—are serious tasks well suited to actuarial techniques and analysis. Yet, it is in the communication of results that a potential source of additional risk resides, particularly when using PowerPoint. If you consider your presentation skills not to be at risk, then it’s probably time to skip to the next article—vade in pace.
1. PowerPoint’s Message
“PowerPoint Pipeline” (The Stepping Stone No. 15, July 2004) discussed the extent to which one’s ideas risk transformation and miscommunication when using PowerPoint. The tendency of PowerPoint presentations to be unidirectional as well as content poor—and that ultimately their content can be lost en route—prompted the pipeline metaphor. Many PowerPoint presentations betray an inflexible ballistic quality: once the slides are launched, you know in advance where they will land and the exact path taken—subject only to the influence of gravity, wind speed and direction. Given the contemporary state of pitch and spin in PowerPoint usage, the basic ability of effective communication to withstand a tool that encourages presenters to make power (bullet) points to their audiences is questionable. In a McLuhanist sense, PowerPoint as a communication Medium risks becoming the Message itself.
2. Return to the PowerPoint Nation
There have been a few developments regarding the topics mentioned in “PowerPoint Pipeline.” The final report of the Return to Flight Task Group, released in July 2005, echoed the (space shuttle) Columbia Accident Investigation Board’s August 2003 criticism of PowerPoint:
We also observed that instead of concise engineering reports, decisions and their associated rationale are often contained solely within Microsoft PowerPoint charts or e-mails. The CAIB report … criticized the use of PowerPoint as an engineering tool, and other professional organizations have also noted the increased use of this presentation software as a substitute for technical reports and other meaningful documentation. PowerPoint (and similar products by other vendors), as a method to provide talking points and present limited data to assembled groups, has its place in the engineering community; however, these presentations should never be allowed to replace, or even supplement, formal documentation.
In September 2005, former Secretary of State Colin Powell conceded that his February 2003 speech to the United Nations Security Council—regarding Iraq and the search for weapons of mass destruction—was personally “painful,” representing a “blot” on his record. While there were other factors, it’s fair to say that PowerPoint did not help.
There has been some resurgence of interest in Marshall McLuhan and his work with the launching of an annual McLuhan International Festival of the Future in Toronto, although this may be to some extent a reflection of his professional association with the University of Toronto.
While there have been recent upgrades of PowerPoint software, singling out specific improvements in its ability to effectively communicate ideas is not easy. Edward Tufte has noted that, “New releases feature ever more elaborated PP Phluff and therapeutic measures for troubled presenters.” Given Microsoft’s dominant market presence, one wonders whether substantive future product innovations will ever materialize. What is clear is that each revision is indeed different from its predecessor, sparking a need for continual user upgrades.
Ian Parker observed, in his May 2001 article “Absolute PowerPoint” published in The New Yorker, that “… there are great tracts of corporate America where to appear at a meeting without PowerPoint would be unwelcome and vaguely pretentious, like wearing no shoes.” And though PowerPoint’s pervasive influence on corporate culture would seem to continue unabated, there are notable examples of successful major league speakers who eschew slideware entirely. Instead of spending time and energy packaging their content as bullet points, each of these speakers instead focuses on using spoken words to deliver their essential message—their particular story.
3. Once Upon A Time
The time-tested power of communicating by telling stories cannot be underestimated. While sales gimmicks frequently have a short shelf life, a good story can be retold with effect again and again. The ability of stories to fire the human imagination and thereby perpetuate their existence even pre-dates their documentation in written form—consider the Greek epic poems that existed for centuries as an oral tradition before finally being written down. The many brief fables ascribed to Aesop, as well as the folk-tales collected by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, demonstrate that even simple stories can have great staying power—ask the younger members of your family!
Much of the information that we receive each day is still in the form of narrative stories (e.g., “He told me …” or “She did …”). This is in direct contrast to McLuhan’s Mosaic Method theory of modern information presentation in which content is fragmented, juxtaposed and often stated without context. Other than one’s weekly grocery list, perhaps the best contemporary example of the Mosaic Method is the daily newspaper USA Today. And the importance of contextual framing and a clear narrative thread when making a presentation are never more apparent than when they are absent—and confusion results.
4. Narrative, Interrupted
The contribution of a strong narrative thread and supporting context help make information transmission more effective and improve comprehension, but they also support information retention. Consider for a moment the half-life of the information transmitted by various means in everyday life. For example, how long would it take you to completely forget half of what you read in 20 minutes on the op-ed page of a serious newspaper or in The Economist, compared to 20 minutes spent with a copy of USA Today? And how do those half-lives compare to the half-life of the information that you received during the first 20 minutes of the last PowerPoint presentation that you attended?
An article on business planning published in the Harvard Business Review emphasized that requiring a plan to “have a narrative logic … encourages clear thinking and brings out the subtlety and complexity of ideas.” One manager said: “If you read just bullet points, you may not get it, but if you read a narrative plan, you will. If there’s a flaw in the logic, it glares right out at you. With bullets, you don’t know if the insight is really there or if the planner has merely given you a shopping list.”
PowerPoint presentations are comprised of a sequential thread of slides that partition information into arbitrary compartments subject to bullet point hierarchies. Given their fractured continuity, these presentations tend to be inherently anti-narrative—placing both comprehension during the presentation and subsequent information retention at risk. Anyone attempting to read a stack of PowerPoint slides for the first time following a presentation may appreciate just how poorly they can convey information on their own.
5. PowerPoint’s Cognitive Style
Edward Tufte is a Yale University professor who authored a series of masterful—and idiosyncratic—books on information design beginning with The Visual Display of Quantitative Information published in 1983. Tufte’s case study of the Columbia accident PowerPoint presentations was the kernel of a booklet published in May 2003, subsequently reissued in a 31-page second edition entitled The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within in January 2006.
(The updated edition is more tightly argued and more cogent. Some of the hyperbole present in the earlier edition has disappeared. Thankfully Peter Norvig’s biting PowerPoint riff on the Gettysburg Address in six slides remains.)
Tufte points out that conventional PowerPoint slide design style yields low data resolution inasmuch as only a minority of the slide’s area is available to show unique material, while the balance is consumed by bullets, frames and branding. The immediate consequence of low resolution PowerPoint slides is that the written language of the slides is often clipped and therefore subject to misinterpretation. Interestingly, Tufte observes that the bullet point phraseology found in many PowerPoint slides has a strangely Orwellian ring. Slogans such as, “Freedom is Slavery” and “Four Legs Good, Two Legs …”—now, how exactly did that phrase go?—could have been lifted directly from a typical PowerPoint presentation.
Ultimately, Tufte recommends replacing PowerPoint with word-processing software—publication quality tools able to handle mathematical notation—to generate information rich high-resolution paper handouts. “This tool design should be driven by the necessities of evidence display, not pitching.”
6. Beyond the Pipeline
You’ll want to keep the end result in mind before attempting to break-out of the traditional PowerPoint “pipeline” and establish more effective communication with others. And modern workplace conventions must obviously be considered as well.
For example, there may be little need to innovate when undertaking rote delivery of a speech or an address. The “stand-and-deliver” approach worked well enough for 17th century highwaymen or on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera, but in these instances the respective roles (and delivery expectations) were usually pre-cast and fairly rigid. And in the later case, the paying audience really did want to hear all of the notes in Di quella pira sung just so—and in the right order too.
Yet a typical actuarial presentation’s message often consists of a proposal or situation report based on involved quantitative analysis, with loads of supporting data—particularly when operating in the stochastic end of the forest. Hence some degree of presentation flexibility may be wise, as not every question can be turned aside (nor should they) with the standard “Let me get back to you” reply. Responding to substantive comments (time permitting) as they are raised rather than deferring them to the end of your presentation may help build a constructive context-specific dialogue with your audience. At the very least it might help demonstrate that your presentation’s timetable (“Gotta get through another 17 slides in the next 10 minutes!”) is not more important to you than your audience’s concerns.
Preparing a technical document (in sentence-paragraph form) to support your slides can help by providing context and a more thorough exposition of your ideas. This document can be distributed either before or after your presentation depending on your need for a concluding “reveal.” And opting to use overhead projector transparencies that can be annotated with a marker—or even good old flip-charts—may give you the real-time flexibility to tailor your message.
While it may be possible to arrive at some sense of your audience’s needs and expectations, it’s nearly impossible to know them as well as they know themselves. So concentrate on knowing your story and its supporting materials—inside and out—so that you can respond and adapt as your presentation unfolds. After all it’s the presentation between your ears that counts, not the thick stack of slides on your laptop’s hard-drive.
7. Suggested Readings
Federman, Mark and Derrick de Kerckhove. McLuhan for Managers: New Tools for New Thinking. Toronto, Ontario: Viking Canada, 2003.
Norvig, Peter. “Gettysburg Cemetery Dedication” PowerPoint presentation. www.norvig.com. Visited May 2007.
Parker, Ian. “Absolute PowerPoint: Can a software package edit our thoughts?” The New Yorker, May 28, 2001 (pages 76-87).
Return to Flight Task Group. Final Report, July 2005. http://returntoflight.org/assets/pdf/final_rtftg_report/RTF_TG_Final_Report_Lo-Res.pdf. Visited May 2007.
Shaw, Gordon, Robert Brown and Philip Bromiley. “Strategic Stories: How 3M is Rewriting Business Planning.” Harvard Business Review, May-June 1998.
Tufte, Edward. The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within. Cheshire, Connecticut: Graphics Press LLC, second edition, January 2006.
Weismen, Steven R. “Powell Calls His U.N. Speech a Lasting Blot on His Record.” The New York Times, September 9, 2005.
Frank Grossman, FSA, FCIA, is a recovered PowerPoint presentation attendee and is feeling much better in Toronto, Ontario. He can be reached at Craigmore54@aol.com.