PRH Consulting Inc. Blog

Was touring Edward Tufte’s website the other day and found a rant against Microsoft Powerpoint. As sort of a fan of Tufte but also Powerpoint, I had to check it out.

His primary complaints seemed to boil down to three things, which don’t really seem to be (completely) Powerpoint’s fault.

• Because it is there, people overuse the built-in templates for bullets, hierarchy, etc. They create too many slides of text statements, indented indefinitely which all eventually blur together. 
• It encourages people to think in “small frame” snapshots. They pop page after page of info on the screen without maintaining a story line. Even worse, there are things that can be made clearer by comparing them on the same page, rather than putting them on two consecutive pages, but Powerpoint discourages doing that.
• It encourages people to adopt a sales-like tone…turning informational reports into something more like a persuasive pitch document.

(Tufte has some great lines by the way…for example “The rigid slide-by-slide hierarchies, indifferent to content, slice and dice the evidence into arbitrary compartments, producing an anti-narrative with choppy continuity.” Check out the original. Or, an article by Tufte that appeared in the September 2003 issue of  Wired.)

Wait though…is it really Powerpoint’s fault? Or is it the author’s fault? Or maybe it is the fault of the business environment. Powerpoint has become a standard. In their haste to keep up, often people don’t spend much time thinking about their document and message — instead, they just do the first thing they think of. Or, they don’t really value the benefits of developing a good presentation over a generic one. Or, they don’t really know what a good presentation or document could look like. (Maybe Powerpoint has some influence/blame there…)

Of course, people in business today will always complain about having to read a lengthy document. And, people who write documents know that “nobody reads anything” so they often limit their information to distilled formats, like bullets.  Or, they assume their Powerpoint is just support for the talking they intent to provide along with it. They believe they can carry the narrative between slides and fill in the gaps between cryptic statements and bullets.

OK, plenty of blame to go around. But what can you do about it?

At PRH Consulting, we tend to use Powerpoint as we would blank paper. You are stuck with a page view, true, but you would be with paper also. (In fact, one of the downsides of the Google Docs’ competing presentation tool is that you can’t make the page any size you want…you are stuck with letter size.)

We have been known to create presentations in Powerpoint but also to use Powerpoint for documents and large-format drawings. In fact, our approach to building content frequently attempts to straddle the world of group-presentation and individual reading…for much of our training, we like to give the user an option to present it in a group setting, use it in a small-group coaching setting, and even as a self-study document. It isn’t easy but it is very possible to do this effectively. The key is knowing the story you are trying to tell, then putting only that information on the page in whatever format does it the best (including a table of numbers, if appropriate…everything doesn’t have to be a graph). Miscellaneous side points, tips, and “watch-for’s” are added using icons or call-outs to keep them out of the way of the main point but still available where they make the most sense.

So, you don’t have to use the built-in outline hierarchies…we often don’t. When we do, we will typically customize the master so it doesn’t have huge distracting indents or multiple types of fonts or bullets that can also be unhelpful clutter.

We use tables alot to compare information or concepts — often in training, you may initially think you want people to understand concept A and concept B but then figure out that you really need them to be able to tell the difference between A and B…if that is the case, you need to be able to put A and B side-by-side to compare them.

Organization of a large presentation or document in Powerpoint can be tricky — a mind-numbing succession of slides is as monotonous as windshield wipers. But you can create slides with a different/recognizable format/color to mark transitions between sections. And we’ve all seen the menu or miniature flow diagram showing “you are here” on every page…it can be overused or pointless (for example, if it is so small you don’t know what it is telling you) but can also be used effectively.

Unfortunately, we are guilty of making questionable assumptions at times. For instance, we have been known to force clip art relating to the message into a slide every now and then…sometimes it is OK but occasionally it probably isn’t necessary. Yes, sometimes it is there only because it felt like there wasn’t enough “visual interest.”

Ultimately, it seemed that Tufte’s message was to “respect your audience.” Don’t waste their time. In our business, we would say that you should have people apply the information you are giving them in a job-like situation. Don’t do data dumps. Don’t present information that you know the audience will not remember later. (As a test, think about the last presentation you attended. Now, try to remember one slide…can you? If it was a good presentation, you may be able to remember the main message and some of the stories/anecdotes used for illustration…but probably not specific bullet points.)

But some “dumbing-down” may be unavoidable. Many writers are lamenting the negative impact on attention span that our immediate communication technology is causing. It is so easy to fax, text, IM, email, etc. that we have lost the patience and ability to actually focus on and read something more in-depth. In fact, in many cases, politicians do most of their debating by flinging buzzwords and talking points around and then just repeating the ones that seem to resonate as opposed to providing reasoned arguments. Maybe we have to become smarter people in order to end world domination by Powerpoint.

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Full disclosure: At PRH Consulting, Powerpoint is our tool of choice for as much as possible. To us, it is equivalent to a blank sheet of paper but easier to use and more widely available than nother drawing programs so, if we hand it off to a client, they have the capability to modify it later.

For another counterpoint, see David Byrne’s post (yes, that David Byrne). Although, I’m not sure he really helps the case for Powerpoint…my knucklehead’s take on his message is that what makes Powerpoint cool is it’s lameness. Not what you’re usually looking for in an advocate but, what the heck…it’s David Byrne…you have to read it!

For more information on how technology is affecting our brains, you could check out “The New Brain” by Richard Resniak, MD.

I was browsing Edward Tufte’s website the other day and stumbled upon a one-paragraph post in which he described being brought in to consult with a large pharmaceutical company to help clarify and simplify their drug labeling and supporting information. His complaint was that he couldn’t make much progress because of the conflict between regulatory and business requirements.

He didn’t provide details but I think I know what he meant. We have experience working with pharma companies and have run into a similar roadblock. Everyone might want to do something but either the fear of fines/penalties (and the associated bad press) or the reluctance to endure the soul-crushing approval process required for any change keeps them from doing it…it just isn’t worth it. The regulations want to cover every possible outcome…the result is that all risks are treated equally — the most remote risk has to be addressed as fully as more likely risks. The result is that companies avoid rocking the boat wherever possible.

For example, let’s say you have a part of a process that you think could work better. Maybe you even occasionally have problems with it. Everyone might believe the right thing to do is to make a change to the process. But that would be very difficult. Of course you would need to actually figure out the change and document it and train the employees…that is a given. But in a regulated industry, you will probably also have to re-validate the process, which is time-consuming and costly…you really don’t want to do it if you don’t absolutely have to.

The result is that it is almost always easier (and preferred by management) to not change the process. Instead, you change the procedures and train the employees more. The first and most common fix to any problem becomes information and training.

The bad news is that creates a snowball effect…everyone has to be retrained, sure, but also those additional materials have to be kept current. Every time there is a correction, there is more information and training to update. Over time, that adds up to a lot of resource and cost but with little return in value.

The fix isn’t to learn to be more efficient at making information and training revisions (though, that never hurts). And it isn’t to sneak process changes in somehow so they don’t require re-validation (if that’s even possible). The real fix is a different model for regulation and rule-making. I don’t know what it would look like or if it’s even possible (or would even be welcomed in the industry). But the mountain of constraints creates an environment where performance is limited, not by capability, but by risk avoidance.

For an interesting talk on how this same principle plays out in our legal system, check out Philip Howard’s talk on www.ted.org “Four Ways to Fix a Broken Legal System.”

Was working today on a decision tool to help sales people sort out a complicated series of customer and technical requirements and limitations in order to determine an appropriate sales recommendation along with potential risks/costs for pricing and potential future “upsell” opportunities. There is a granular batch of information and, depending on the customer’s current situation, certain things would be factors influencing the decisions but none led you directly to a solution. Rather, it is more like each piece of information added a little weight to the balance and you probably wouldn’t know which way the balance will finally swing until the end of the decision process. And, even when you know the decision, there would be a bunch of  “qualifiers” to be addressed. “You could do ‘A,’ but then you would also have to do ‘B.’ Or, you could do ‘C’ but then you would be limited later…If you still do ‘A’ include extra costs for…”

I was reminded of how difficult but important it is to produce a clean, straightforward result. For one thing, salespeople are notoriously impatient. They don’t like complex “if-then” strings that go on forever. So, if you want people to use the tool, it has to be intuitive and pretty quick to generate an answer. The other issue is context. When will they use this tool? Sitting with the customer? Taking a tour of the customers’ facilities? At their desk after the visit? Or even just as part of their preparation? These factors all influence the tool structure, format, and platform (that is, how it is delivered).

One thing that affects ease of use is a clear structure. Can someone tell where the information they are looking for would be? Format matters here too — on each screen, you really need to know where to look, you need to be able to anticipate what you will find on the next screen when you click a link. And, with all the details, we needed to make it clear what information was important and what only might be useful in some situations.

Building the initial version, the team found ourselves jumping back and forth from the overview level (to make sure it works in the performance setting) to very specific details (to make sure it is correct). Essentially, we were zooming back and forth between concept definition and partial prototyping until we found a structure that would work. Fun and frustrating to facilitate (and probably frustrating to participate!). This type of work is really better done individually but that wasn’t an option in this case.

Ultimately, the key is to find the important factors driving a given decision. Often, your first impression is that there are a large number of things to think about but usually, after a closer look, you can find one or two things that merit the lion’s share of the attention.

If you start feeling resistance from technical experts implying that “it’s not that easy” but nobody can find an error, you are getting pretty close. Experts tend to prefer focusing on the “non-standard” while practitioners prefer getting the rules that work reasonably well in most situations. Effective design of tools and information for end users has to find the balance in that tension.