Quoted - PowerPoint Makes Us Stupid - Does this happen in your projects?

Enemy Lurks in Briefings on Afghan War – PowerPoint – NYTimes.com.

from http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/27/world/27powerpoint.html?ref=world

(Click the link above to read the article.)

The image above is of a powerpoint slide shown in a military briefing in the summer of 2009. It was meant to portray the complexity of the situation. “‘When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war,’ General McChrystal dryly remarked.”

“PowerPoint makes us stupid,” Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander, said this month at a military conference in North Carolina. (He spoke without PowerPoint.) Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster, who banned PowerPoint presentations when he led the successful effort to secure the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar in 2005, followed up at the same conference by likening PowerPoint to an internal threat.

“It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control,” General McMaster said in a telephone interview afterward. “Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.”

Does this happen in your projects? I think it’s a risk that comes with over-scaling your project management tools and process: too many or too large status reports, for example.

Does your status report show the good and the bad? Or does it communicate a greater sense of control than really exists?

Do your stakeholders come to status update meetings excited to hear where you’re at and how things are progressing, or do they stumble in ready to endure a powerpoint beating?

Do you run your status meetings like the press conferences referred to in the article?

The news media sessions often last 25 minutes, with 5 minutes left at the end for questions from anyone still awake. Those types of PowerPoint presentations, Dr. Hammes said, are known as “hypnotizing chickens.”

Or do you foster real discussion, discovery, and exploration?

Related posts:

1. Project Status Updates – Powerpoint Hell