39. PowerPoint and the Military: Sometimes More Is More

A New York Times article by Elisabeth Bumiller, titled, “We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint,” showed a dense, complicated PowerPoint slide that the Pentagon used in a presentation to describe the complexity of the situation in Afghanistan. The slide, a swirl of overlapping lines, arrows, words, and colors, resembling a bowl of spaghetti, proceeded to make its viral way around the Internet as yet another example of the abuses of PowerPoint, particularly by the military.^F39.1

Richard Engel, the NBC News chief foreign correspondent, was the first to publish the slide on his blog, where he described two diametrically different reactions to the slide from the military itself:

For some military commanders, the slide is genius, an attempt to show how all things in war—from media bias to ethnic/tribal rivalries—are interconnected and must be taken into consideration .... But for others, the diagram represents a fool’s errand that the United States has taken on in the name of national security.^F39.2

Another reaction came from General Stanley A. McChrystal, the then—and since summarily deposed—leader of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan. According to Ms. Bumiller, General McChrystal said, “When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war.”

Ms. Bumiller then went beyond the slide itself to discuss the chronic use and abuse of PowerPoint in the military, quoting two other senior officers: Marine Corps General James N. Mattis, the Joint Forces commander, who said, “PowerPoint makes us stupid,” and Brigadier General H.R. McMaster, a veteran of combat in Iraq, who said, “It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control.”

PowerPoint is a constant source of chatter in the blogosphere and the presentation trade, all of it a loud hue and cry against the software in general and its effect on the military in particular. In the vanguard of the attackers is Thomas X. Hammes, a retired Marine colonel, who wrote a widely distributed article, called “Dumb-Dumb Bullets,” first published in Armed Forces Journal. He complained:

PowerPoint is not a neutral tool—it is actively hostile to thoughtful decision-making .... Instead of forcing officers to learn the art of summarizing complex issues into coherent arguments, staff work now places a premium on slide building.^F39.3

As you’ve read throughout this section, I am in violent agreement with Mr. Hammes and all the other critics about the abuses of PowerPoint. My plea for simplicity in design is echoed by a cottage industry of consultants, coaches, designers, and authors. Chief among these are Garr Reynolds, whose Presentation Zen imaginatively applies the principles of Japanese minimalism to graphic design, and Nancy Duarte, whose slide:ology offers a wealth of simple but creative ways to display ideas visually.

However, I depart from counseling simplicity in the case of the Pentagon’s complex Afghanistan slide and side with those military commanders who see it as genius. The spaghetti-like image effectively illustrates the complexity of that situation. PowerPoint’s most basic function is to illustrate, not to make coherent arguments—that is the role of the presenter. Nor is it to document—that is the role of a text file. The one and only role of PowerPoint is to show what the presenter is telling.

One of the most illustrative and effective slides I have ever seen in the business world was for the IPO road show of a computer company. It was a single slide that showed the logos of the company’s customers—all 600 of them—an image to loosen the purse strings of any skeptical investor.

Sometimes, More Is More.