Having recently spent a pleasant few weeks with the Allied Rapid Reaction Corps, I am disappointed to report that William Lind’s thoughts about PowerPoint are equally applicable outside the US military:
The U.S. military has carried the formal meeting’s uselessness to a new height with its unique cultural totem, the PowerPoint brief. Almost all business in the American armed forces is now done through such briefings… The briefing format was devised to use form to conceal a lack of substance. PowerPoint, by reducing everything to bullets, goes one better. It makes coherent thought impossible. Bulletizing effectively makes every point equal in importance, which prevents any train of logic from developing. Thoughts are presented like so many horse apples, spread randomly on the road.
Observations elsewhere are confirmed by my experience: my co-workers in the ARRC commented that if it wasn’t on PowerPoint, it didn’t exist, and every day was a race to get as much as possible into the daily slideshow. Now that we know where the contagion originated, the remedy is clear – NATO should be quarantined immediately, and all officer ranks isolated while we crank out huge quantities of PowerPoint vaccine. The nature of this vaccine is clear for Lind: talking.
General Greg Newbold, USMC… asked for conversations with people who actually knew the material, regardless of their rank. Five or ten minutes of knowledgeable, informal conversation accomplished far more than hours of formal briefing.”
Proving once again that new technology isn’t necessarily an improvement on old technology – as per my post on paper. Pick the right technology for the task in hand, and always be questioning our use of technology to make sure that we’re not being taken for a ride. This is repellent to a large proportion of the social media set, who sometimes seem to believe that mere talking fails to deliver much substance – far better to attach a photo, mark up your location via GPS or retweet yo’self.