Many people blame email and its bad uses to be the cause of many problems. But there are many tools which use may cause unexpected insidious damages. Powerpoint is one of them. I ‘m talking about Powerpoint beaucause it’s the market leader but all its competitors are in the same situation because, once again, the tool itself is not responsible by itslef but the way it’s used is.

My purpose is not to say that such presentations favors the form to the detriment of the content, there’s already been many things writen about that. These tools are very good at delivering a message. The success of presentations shared on sites like slideshare un reused through the web is the best evidence. The problem comes from the fact presentations tools are often mistaken for decision making tools.

In Powerpoint there is “power”. In keynote (for mac addicts) there is “key”. So their purpose is clear : right to the point, highlight main ideas.

So, what are these tools used for ? Make a sales or maerketing presentation, support a speaker’s speach. All right, that what they are designed for. But danger comes when they are used as reporting tools, being used, in the end, for decision making.

These tools are not made for reporting

Did you already notice the number of people who take notes on powerpoint during a meeting ? Worse, did anyone already send you 10 slides while you were expecting a memo about a given issue ?

You get either ununderstanble slides, filled with lots of sentences, or slides going straight to the point and hidding a large part of the reality.

When someone is asked to make a memo, a report, there is a perfect tool for that. It’s called Word. It allow to write sentences in plain english, to insert spreadsheets, charts, pictures. It’s even possible to generate an index, to make up pages in order to build structured and nice looking documents. If you’ve never tried this software before, I think you should. When such a document is asked for, it means that a clear and exhaustive vision of the situation is needed.

These tools are not decision making tools

When people use slides, they point at the main issues, tends and informations, what they want to highlight. No place for weak signals here. But how many decisions makers use powerpoints made by their staff to make a decision ?

Let me explain. Who wants to know more about a situation in order to make a decision asks his subordinate who asks his own suborndinate…. and the request often ends at the end of the hierarchical chain. Then the person in charges makes an exhaustive job then applies two rules.

- only the main trends have to be mentioned. So, weak signales are banned.

- when you give such a document to your superior, you emphasis what is going right and smooth what your superior would not be happy to read.

Then the superior reads the slides and, before transmitting it to his own superior, cleans it, following these rules

- the two above mentioned rules apply

- many things your subordinate found important have not to be mentioned to your superior, whom have other concerns.

When the powerpoint reaches its final destination, 2/3 of the informations have been removed, everything that would be useful to understand what are the coming trends beyond the actual situation.

Example : the captain of a boat receives a report saying : “the sun is high, let’s speed up. The original report from a ship boy was saying “very small leaks, no life jacket, iceberg ahead”.

We have good tools to make many things. But if we don’t use them wisely, they may cause more harm than good.

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