Knock, knock, knocking PowerPoint, all week long.
Anybody who cares about “our” kind of information management should read Edward Tufte’s classic The Visual Display of Quantitive Information. Yes, I know it’s expensive – get your gran to buy it you for Christmas or something. What I didn’t know is that Tufte also wrote a short essay called The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint – which at $7 for 32 pages frankly isn’t worth your gran’s pension money (get her to buy you Unknown Soldier instead) – which lays out exactly what is wrong with PowerPoint:
How is it that each elaborate architecture of thought always fits exactly on one slide? The rigid slide-by-slide hierarchies, indifferent to content, slice and dice the evidence into arbitrary compartments, producing an anti-narrative with choppy continuity… The format reflects a common conceptual error in analytic design: information architectures mimic the hierarchical structure of large bureaucracies pitching the information.
Did everybody at the back hear that? I’ll repeat it in bold: The format reflects a common conceptual error in analytic design: information architectures mimic the hierarchical structure of large bureaucracies pitching the information. Now as you all know, my own preference is that information architecture and the associated technology should bind to existing organisational processes – so does that mean that I disagree with Tufte?
Absolutely not, because organisational processes don’t usually match up with organisational structures, and information flow in particular looks nothing like the organigram. However this creates a serious design problem when you try to fit the two together, which is why we end up with PowerPoint slides that, by bearing a cosmetic resemblance to the organisational structure, can fool everybody into thinking they represent the way the organisation thinks.
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I think that you actually described a profound truth in the last three words of your post: organisations think. Not only its constituents (people) think, but organisations as a whole develop thought patterns, that in turn shape thoughts and actions of the people who work in, with, and for the organisation. And all this is hardly ever recognised in information management designs.
Absolutely, and that’s what I mean when I talk about how important it is for information processes to bind to organisational processes.
In particular, information flow can be thought of more as the subconscious mind of the organisation than the conscious reasoning – the conscious reasoning is represented on the organigram, of course, but people rarely have similar tools to track the subconscious…
I have such a tool, but who listens to me?