Death by PowerPoint
Chapter 21: Could the Columbia space shuttle have been saved?
Dear Friend,
I’m guessing many of you already dislike PowerPoint, but this week I’m giving you even more fuel for your hatred by explaining why PowerPoint is responsible for the Columbia space shuttle disaster. This week’s chapter also includes my favorite non-fiction thing Isaac Asimov ever wrote (teaser: he tried to teach the government how to be creative), plus some quotes from Steve Jobs, Edward Tufte, and Jeff Bezos. Stay creative.
Your friend,
Ade
“One of the great mistakes that society has been demonstrating in our last century has been that of leaving the most important problems to the men who are bankrupt in creative thinking ability.” —Buckminster Fuller
Twelve days before the Columbia space shuttle burned up re-entering Earth’s atmosphere, NASA held a meeting. They convened to assess the damage caused by debris that broke loose after liftoff.
Engineers estimated that the impact of the debris was 640 times more extreme than any test that had ever been performed on insulation tiles. That was the good news. The bad news was that if the debris had struck the wing, instead of the insulation tiles, the damage would be even more catastrophic. Presented with this information, NASA did nothing. Why?
Could the Columbia astronaut’s deaths have been prevented? If you had been in the room with the NASA decision makers could you have made a difference? Below is the PowerPoint slide that contained the potentially life-saving information.
Hidden beneath jargon, misleading headings, and buried within deeply nested bullet points was the information that should have alerted NASA officials to the danger that Columbia’s crew faced. The information was there, hidden in plain sight. A catastrophic warning went unnoticed.
Where does the blame lie in this situation? Do we blame the high-ranking NASA employees who dozed off during the presentation? Do we blame the Boeing contractors who helped prepare the slide deck? Do we blame the employees who truly knew the danger represented in the data for not being more vocal? Do we blame the researchers who failed to test the materials to the extremes that the ship encountered? Do we blame the team responsible for the component that broke loose? Do we question the team that built the wing that couldn’t sustain the impact? Do we blame Microsoft, the company who birthed software that PowerPoint culture clings to? Do we blame the school system that graduates students who can barely assemble bullet points, let alone compelling complete sentences? The blame rolls off each party, everyone has an alibi, an excuse, a finger to point in another direction.
NASA’s PowerPoint slide probably looks familiar, it could be the sibling of any of the dull presentations we have all been exposed to. Edward Tufte, the notorious data visualization guru and vocal PowerPoint hater, describes NASA’s slide as a reflection of the culture within NASA. He said,
“The language, spirit, and presentation tool of the pitch culture had penetrated throughout the NASA organization, even into the most serious technical analysis, the survival of the shuttle.”
Tufte, and the following two year study by the Columbia Accident Investigation Board put the blame on a culture of PowerPoint slides. They essentially said that the NASA engineers were using the wrong tool for the job. But to blame PowerPoint is to miss the incompetence hiding in the negative space. Do we think the same people who botched the PowerPoint would have done better with any other tool, or any other format? Could their message have broken through any better if they chose long form writing, a case study, a printed report, video, or a white paper?
We should also leave open the possibility that the people who hid the critical data in that slide know exactly what they were doing. Perhaps they knew the risks but didn’t want to be the ones responsible for scrapping the mission and shifting all effort into finding a way to repair the ship. In that situation the slide did its job perfectly. For our purposes, however, let’s assume the best intentions of NASA’s PowerPoint deck’s creators.
I am no fan of PowerPoint, but there is no reason that the severity of the problem couldn’t be conveyed on a slide. Pixels are free, and that single slide could have been spread over multiple screens, each bullet point rewritten, explained, and illustrated to clearly convey the danger.
PowerPoint makes it easy to put information in front of a crowd, but it doesn’t make it easier for the crowd to connect to the message. That’s why PowerPoint has so few fans, we’ve all been bored to tears by presenters who read aloud page after page of bullet points. Even the Chief Executive of Microsoft, the company that birthed PowerPoint, fell out of love with the baby. Steve Balmer tried to head off pointless meetings and bad presentations by having employees send him the information prior to the meeting. He said,
“So most meetings nowadays, you send me the materials and I read them in advance. And I can come in and say: ‘I've got the following four questions. Please don't present the deck.’”
That’s one approach. If the PowerPoint deck can’t stand up on its own without you propping it up with your jargon and laser pointer, maybe the CEO can save you the embarrassment by canceling your meeting. Steve Jobs described the problem like this,
“I hate the way people use slide presentations instead of thinking. People would confront a problem by creating a presentation. I wanted them to engage, to hash things out at the table, rather than show a bunch of slides. People who know what they're talking about don't need PowerPoint.”
PowerPoint decks often cause an illusion for presenters. Standing in front of your words projected on the wall in huge letters makes it feel like your ideas have more power than they do. To you it feels obvious, how could the audience miss what you are trying to say? Meanwhile, your audience tuned out ten slides ago after the first bullet point. By the time we get to the end of the presentation, the illusion has left us completely unaware of our failure to communicate.
In our minds our thoughts feel perfectly formed, brilliant insights that we bless our friends, family, and co-workers with. The truth is that most of our words are wasted on deaf ears, hidden agendas, wandering minds, good intentions, and the low fidelity of human memory.
Even if we are self-aware enough to realize we regularly botch the delivery of our ideas we still expect the person on the other side to get the general gist of our message. But they don't. We take their smiles and friendly nods to mean comprehension but in reality they are waiting for you to stop talking so that they can squirt their own idea dressing on top of your word salad.
Despite being exposed to the poor communication of others, most of us will deny that we are also bad communicators. Oblivious to the illusion, we inhabit a cartoon bubble where each of us carries a different reality in our heads. The cartoon bubble pops when the inevitable breakdown happens. Start paying attention to situations when you hear phrases like this:
“You never told me that.”
“Don't put words in my mouth.”
“Why didn't you say so sooner?”
“Where is this coming from?”
“That's not what I meant.”
“How can you believe that?”
“That's news to me.”
“I thought you were my friend.”
“How could you possibly think that was a good idea.”
“Why haven’t they fired him yet?”
“I just don’t understand how…”
“This is completely insane.”
Denials like this happen all the time and they are evidence of multiple realities colliding. Similar to how we repurpose coffee to trigger flow, being aware of the significance of these phrases equips us with a mechanism to detect reality distortions. If we are vigilant and pay attention to these verbal artifacts of communication leakage, we can allow these phrases to shift us into user zero mode. Instead of being blindsided, we can begin to step inside the bubbles of other people’s realities. This gives us a big advantage over the people oblivious to the movie playing in their heads.
As you become more aware of the flow of information you will be more likely to bend reality instead of being bent by it. You will start to notice the information gaps. You will be able to predict collapses. You will influence decision makers (without them even realizing it). You will head-off inevitable breakdowns.
Breaking the PowerPoint illusion, understanding how our words are perceived by others, is the first step in creating ideas that resonate outside your skull. But just because you can see that your words are boring your audience isn’t enough. How do you create ideas that connect with people? One of the most effective methods is story telling.
Jeff Bezos has banned PowerPoint from executive meetings in favor of memos that are written in narrative form. The first part of the meeting is held in silence while participants read the memo. Once everyone has read the story, meaningful discussion can begin.
A similar emphasis on narrative has transformed how software is built. Rather than building code to precise and dull specifications, engineers work from user stories. When the end user’s problem or desire can be understood by the developer, the job of creating software changes from writing code to solving problems for real people.
What are you left with if you strip the drama out of your ideas? Without a story, you are left with a list of dull, disconnected incomplete sentences. Bullet points aren’t discouraged, they are the the default format of slide templates. The Columbia disaster study called the problem “PowerPoint Culture” but it could have just as easily called it “bullet point culture.” Google CEO Sundar Pichai isn’t banning PowerPoint, instead he endorses training employees to tell stories rather than barf bullet points. He said,
“Since stories are best told with pictures, bullet points and text-heavy slides are increasingly avoided at Google.”
There is no denying that pictures are more entertaining than bullet points, but a beautiful picture with a buzzword layered on top doesn’t guarantee your message will persuade anyone. The quality that elevates a slide off the wall and into people’s brains doesn’t come from following a formula. Jeff Bezos says,
“Much of the time, readers react to great memos very similarly. They know it when they see it. The standard is there, and it is real, even if it’s not easily describable.”
This is why the PowerPoint paradox is so difficult to solve and it is why the slide deck has become an institutional default despite being a tool that is overwhelmingly disliked. When a presentation works, it can move people in profound ways. When it fails, space ships fall out of the sky in streams of smoke. Banning a digital tool won’t help. Banning bullet points won’t help. Reducing word counts and mandating pictures fails, too. The real challenge is figuring out how to tell a good story.
In theory, we should all be able to tell compelling stories because our schooling equipped us with the necessary skills. We all took English classes, we fulfilled the requirements for language arts. We understand the technical rules for writing, but the secret eludes us. We can crank out sentences that follow the rules perfectly but still fail to connect.
The typical deck contains nothing new, no itching questions, no tantalizing facts, no threats, humor, creativity – none of the mechanisms that engage user zero. Telling a good story requires a new idea, a creative insight that transcends the technical standards.
The power of storytelling was not a secret to NASA, in fact in the early days of the space program scientists sought the help of the world’s greatest science fiction writer. In 1959, panicked by Russia’s launch of Sputnik, DARPA asked Isaac Asimov to help America’s young space program catch the Russians.
Asimov wanted to help the government, but he abandoned the partnership because he realized how incapable of generating new ideas the government was. However, before he walked away, Asimov wrote an essay titled On Creativity where he attempted to answer the question, “How do people get new ideas?” The document remained a secret, lost in a file cabinet for half a century until it was uncovered in 2014. I encourage you to seek out Asimov’s complete essay, but I will share the passages that are exceptionally well-fitted to our journey as user zero. Asimov says,
“My feeling is that as far as creativity is concerned, isolation is required... The presence of others can only inhibit this process, since creation is embarrassing. For every new good idea you have, there are a hundred, ten thousand foolish ones, which you naturally do not care to display.”
This is the realm of user zero, the privacy of your imagination, not the public performance of group brainstorming sessions or big room meetings. This is the endless stream of data where we seek the egg of knowledge from chapter 17, the infinite void where Teslian curiosity is our best hope of discovery. Creativity doesn’t live in the ideas that are comfortable parading in front of a crowd, regardless of how safe a space you inhabit with co-workers. Creativity comes from the ten-thousand fragile ideas that pivot on the edge of foolishness. Our brittle thoughts can barely survive the hostile environment of our own self-criticism, let alone withstand the scrutiny outside the mind of user zero.
You can’t put creativity on a deadline. You need the time to wrestle with the ideas that, at first glance, seem outlandish. Uncertainty can be unbearable and we often rush to decisions just to avoid the discomfort. Asimov goes on to say,
“The world in general disapproves of creativity, and to be creative in public is particularly bad. Even to speculate in public is rather worrisome. The individuals must, therefore, have the feeling that the others won’t object.”
The last thing any presenter wants to feel as they stand in front of a group is vulnerability. This is why slides are typically designed to be the last word on a subject, not the beginning. They aren’t an invitation to participate, they are appendixes to closed cases. When confronted with a legitimately new idea most people’s response is not praise. They will probably be polite, but in their head they are struggling with feelings of mockery, ridicule, and disgust for the foreign concept. That’s because the natural response to the truly incredible is incredulity.
We might claim otherwise, but the top priority of any presentation is a desire to protect ourselves from embarrassment. Even more broadly, the aim of our careers is not to shake the boat with outlandish ideas, but to find logical arguments that might safely bullet-point our way to promotions. Our jobs are often obstacles to breakthrough rather than allies of new ideas. Asimov says,
“The great ideas of the ages have come from people who weren’t paid to have great ideas, but were paid to be teachers or patent clerks or petty officials, or were not paid at all. The great ideas came as side issues.”
Once something becomes a job it ceases to exist in the same part of the brain where creativity thrives. Sure, we can trick our brains into forgetting about the assembly line. Yes, we can decorate our desks with flair that takes the edge off the factory setting. Some of us even get to work from home in our pajamas. The crazy thing is that it is really hard to bring the creative goods to your job, but your hobbies, the things that you do purely for love, these are the places where our best work happens naturally.
Money changes our relationship to idea generation. If creativity strikes, the process feels like luck. If the idea gods neglect you it feels like we haven’t earned our paycheck. You feel guilty either way, and as Asimov says,
“To feel guilty because one has not earned one’s salary because one has not had a great idea is the surest way, it seems to me, of making it certain that no great idea will come in the next time either.”
To earn our paycheck we feel like we must stand in front of our peers and prove our worth. Our presentations aren’t built around shifting the mindset of others, but rather to justify our value to the organization. It takes more confidence to not give a presentation at all than it does to fill the room with hot air. And the scariest thing of all is to deliver a presentation that flies in the face of group consensus. Asimov says,
“A person willing to fly in the face of reason, authority, and common sense must be a person of considerable self-assurance. Since he occurs only rarely, he must seem eccentric (in at least that respect) to the rest of us. A person eccentric in one respect is often eccentric in others. Consequently, the person who is most likely to get new ideas is a person of good background in the field of interest and one who is unconventional in his habits.”
For NASA to deviate from a tradition of PowerPoint presentations would, as Asimov says, be unconventional. Some might say, crazy. But had Asimov’s letter been embraced instead of lost in a filing cabinet half a century ago, perhaps there would have been a hero with the courage to champion a dangerous idea that transcended the confines of a PowerPoint slide. Maybe user zero could have saved Columbia.
