{"id":11955,"date":"2014-01-27T06:00:19","date_gmt":"2014-01-26T19:00:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=11955"},"modified":"2014-01-29T06:56:26","modified_gmt":"2014-01-28T19:56:26","slug":"avoiding-death-by-powerpoint","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/avoiding-death-by-powerpoint\/","title":{"rendered":"Avoiding death by powerpoint"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"A<\/a>Many of you will head back tomorrow from holidays and into lecture halls and conference rooms after this Australia Day holiday weekend. In preparation, please take a moment to arm yourself some simple tools to subvert PowerPoint<\/a>. These few weapons will help ward off the bullet-point boredom that clicks through the slides from daydreams to distraction to ennui to the comatose state that is death-by-PowerPoint<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The PowerPoint trap is the promise to bypass prose and yet turn pap into points of purpose or even principles to steer by. No thinking required, just follow the dot points. PowerPoint doesn\u2019t just avoid prose. It can also reduce great prose to pap. See Peter Norvig’s classic reduction of Lincoln\u2019s Gettysburg Address to a slide presentation<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The military is especially afflicted by the PowerPoint syndrome\u2014perhaps the men and women in uniform really do have higher pain thresholds. When I occasionally speak\/lecture\/bore with purpose to military audiences, my three opening jests in descending order are:<\/p>\n

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  1. The mantra known to all one-star officers and above\u2014the Army sleeps under the stars, the Navy navigates by the stars and the Air Force pick their hotel by the stars.<\/li>\n
  2. What’s the difference between a Jumbo jet and a fighter pilot? When you turn off the Jumbo, the whining stops. (What is it about the Air Force?)<\/li>\n
  3. PowerPoint may be a new high in our civilisation and a wonder of the age, but as a simple wordsmith I’m unworthy of its blessings, and will forsake the power of pointing and just talk like an old fashioned human. No PowerPoint today!<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    The first two are weak jests and the abjuring PowerPoint line isn\u2019t even a jest at all, but it always seems to get the loudest response. Maybe what I hear as laughter is just a roar of relief.<\/p>\n

    Note that of the three points I\u2019ve just made, only one has any relationship at all to the putative topic. This is a hint at the direction our subversive approach will take. To deconstruct a PowerPoint death march is to apply basic questions about the strength and relationships of the various arguments being flashed up on the screen. PowerPoint doesn’t lend itself to attack by Hegel\u2019s dialectics<\/a>.<\/p>\n

    Usually, you don’t have the time in a presentation to decide big questions of truth. Content yourself with checking the logic trail. Quick and simple tools are needed. Take the dot points on their own terms. Accept that PowerPoint is very good at displaying lists. The weakness enters when those lists are supposed to construct a logic chain. Your job is to test the strength of the links in the chain; do the dots add up to a real point?<\/p>\n

    Here are the four weapons to apply as those bullet points fly. Sorry for presenting these in point form but, as acknowledged, this is a good way to do lists. Here are the tests you apply:<\/p>\n