Managing the most evil technology of all
14 May 2005A busy week, mainly fuelled by coffee and loathing for the world, as I did the final module of my MSc, on the Management of Technology. A quick aside for all of you who don’t know how my Science & Technology Studies degree works – the previous 5 modules take place over the course of a term and consist of weekly lectures, seminars and prescribed readings; this sixth module is a one-week intensive course at the Management School.
Now, I would love to have told you that all the prejudices about management that the likes of Dilbert have instilled in me over the years were swept away… but it left me drained and jaded, such that only long walks in Holyrood Park and cooking a ginormous curry have managed to return me to some sort of inspired state.
For a course all about technology (which, like many of the key concepts in the course, like ‘user’ and ‘innovation’ was poorly defined) it didn’t really engage in how technology or technological development comes about. It generally took a sort of fatalist line that all technological development is inevitable (or at least not very controllable) and we’re there to maybe nudge it here and there and get by the best we can; coming off the back of the age of Microsoft’s monopoly and the dot-com boom, this is an easy mindset to fall into; with the ever-growing open source movement, the reclaiming of the word ‘hacking’ (in its original sense) and the new wave of innovative, user-driven companies that co-operate with the non-commercial sphere (Google, Flickr etc.), a vision that says communities and people can very much take control of technologies, is starting to emerge, but has been missed here.
Anyway, this slavery to the idea of technology may have just be a theoretical bias to the course, if it wasn’t so horrifically demonstrated by the omipresence of one thing, one technology that proves the evil of banality: PowerPoint.
We were obliged throughout the week to come up with presentation after presentation. Unfortunately, coupled with that came a total and utter de-skilling in the art of conveying information. What gets me most about PowerPoint is not just how the layouts severely constrain how much information can be conveyed, nor how everything must now be laid out in bullet lists (or else). The feature that is most evil is the one that, rather than display a slide’s bullets all in one go, makes them appear one-by-one (the more literate, or illiterate, depending how you look at it, creator can make them fade in, whoosh in from the side, etc.). The result is the speaker is reduced to little more than reading through each bullet in turn off the screen (“Let’s see, what do we have next… [click] …oh yes, capital costs, which, as the slide says…”), the staccato pace of the slide preventing any other form of speech. Rather than being able to create a coherent narrative that is summed up by the bullet points, the bullet points become the narrative; the speaker is tne one doing the summing-up. And though it’s bad when your classmates do it, when the lecturer is doing it as well, then it’s really worrying.
Toyota (apparently) have a company motto, which goes roughly like: “we design our factories so our workers use the machine, not vice versa” – something I learned during this very course, ironically enough. PowerPoint does the exact opposite of this; the slides dictate the speaker, and as they are designed on a computer screen, in a purely textual discourse with no audience rather than a verbal one with many people, the awful result is banal and crappy presentations.
Threatened with becoming one of the zombies myself, I had to come up with some sort of plan. What follows is how I tried to wriggle free, and hopefully may come in handy for anyone else who dislikes using PowerPoint: you can dictate the technology and make it work for you, rather than vice versa. Here’s how: Make as few slides as you can, and then ignore them as much as possible. Don’t have a copy of the slides to hand when speaking (make a separate set of notes instead), stand well in front of the screen when talking, and only look back when you’re really lost for words. Not all bullets are equal, nor are all slides, so don’t feel obliged to cover each one the same (or at all, for that matter). Above all, remember that “effective use of PowerPoint” is an oxymoron. PowerPoint is the backup, the reinforcing mechanism, the provider of background – it should never actively take a role; the most effective tools you possess are your own words.
Ooh, that sounded nicely management and wanky, that last sentence, didn’t it? Speaking of which – here is a genuine diagram that was presented to us in one of the lectures. I think someone was having a laugh.
Derek Marshall
Nice one. You are so right.
I don’t (nearly) ever use bullets in PP presentations; instead, look at the information you want (or have) to present, and see how it fits together around a common theme. Use the graphical layout of the page to enhance this theme and the key points you want to present. In the same way that you remember the route to a mate’s house by landmarks, you remember information better when you have a visual link to the context it’s in.
As far as using it as an aide memoire for your talk; that’s a load of crap meant for people who haven’t rehearsed their work and don’t know enough about it to blag. IMHO, the PP should be used as background, to contextualise or to highlight detail appropriately. There’s no point delivering the same thing twice – treat the audience as stupid and they will be stupid in return. Treat them as intelligent, able to use their eyes *and* their ears, and if you get it right they will be intelligent for you.
I hate PowerPoint, and the entire MicroSoft (“Make it easy to produce the same document as everyone else”) philosophy, but that doesn’t mean that it can’t be used to good effect if you consciously refuse to fit into it’s straightjacketed approach.
Ric
Assuming you were assessed on these presentations, how did they take your ‘alternative’ approach? I know where I am there are a large chunk of drones/morons who would immediately mark me down. On the other hand there does seem to be a new realisation of what you are saying and a move away from ‘death by powerpoint’ (or ‘death by viewgraph’ where there is only an OHP)
The first good example of a different approach to presentations i ever got was the Free Culture presenation by Lessig – http://www.eff.org/IP/freeculture/
I’m pretty sure you know the Ed Tufte approach to PP, so i’ll leave that out.
I was also going to link to an article about new mind-mapping software competing with PP but can’t find it. The concept was basically to run your presentation off a mind map by clicking/zooming into areas of interest then coming back out to the big picture as required. Anyway, not sure what where i’m going anymore…
Chris
That particular exercise was peer-marked and doesn’t contribute to my final mark… on the feedback sheets my “use of audio and visual materials” was average/don’t know, rather than good, though my speaking style was marked as good.
One of our lecturers used mind-mapping software as well, on a projector; the result was similar to his use of PowerPoint – his talking was led on by the pre-created diagram thoroughout. Interface-wise I thought it was horrible, only a small portion of the maps are shown at any one time. The display rapidly changed as branches of the map were opened and later closed, which was jarring to the eye and quite distracting. I can see a lot of room for improvement to turn it into a proper presentation (rather than mere organisation) tool – maybe shrinking or greying out parts of the maps that are not immediately being focused on, rather than hiding them outright. Even then, I think the demands it places on the speaker, making them have to pay constant attention to the screen rather than their audience, doesn’t bode well for the quality of presentations.
Phil Edwards
As far as using it as an aide memoire for your talk; that’s a load of crap meant for people who haven’t rehearsed their work and don’t know enough about it to blag.
The worst of it is, once people have seen PP used this way a few times they start to believe that everything they need to say should be on the slides. Since slides are supposed to be bullet-lists, that’s all they write – and they end up delivering a list of subject-headings and acronyms in the belief that it’s a presentation. A fairly techie presentation I attended a while back went very largely like this (slide text bolded):
“Technologies, some of the technologies we use.
DAO, anyone used that? Just a few of you.
OGSA-DAI, that’s quite an interesting one.
Globus Toolkit, anyone used that? Pretty much the same people…”
And so on for eight or nine bullet points – followed by another slide listing eight or nine architectures or front ends or Web services protocols…
If rule one is don’t recite, rule 1.1 is you do not need the slides. Slides are for you to talk across or paraphrase or undercut or contradict or parody (or to undercut, contradict or parody what you’re saying).
L.
PowerPoint is just a tool – you can choose to use it well or badly, it is not inherently evil. Bullet point talks are perfectly appropriate in some cases and not in others. You are all over generalising madly.
Check out the Beyond Bullet Points website though. (I don’t have the URL to hand)
Much worse than bullet points are transitions.
Cliff
Here’s the URL that “L.” mentioned – a way to present clear and focused thinking without any bullet points whatsoever:
http://www.sociablemedia.com
Adam
It depends if you are going to print the slides for use as a handout. If you are, then put just enough information on each slide that people looking back at them later will have the bare bones of what you said – but not all of it. Leave white space on the slides and elaborate on the text, give caveats and exceptions and connections to other topics. This way people can write down the extras themselves. People will feel compelled to pay more attention to everything you say, even if it’s on the slide, so that they don’t miss the additions and because you aren’t just reading bullet points your speech can flow better and is inherently easier to listen to. Jokes or sarcastic comments about the topic also worked for me, but I did know my audience and tutor fairly well.