PowerPoint when Thinking is Critical

The year I worked for Dave Snowden’s IBM Cynefin Centre, I was required to use the official Big Blue PowerPoint template. Based on 12pt Arial, the template was impossible to read, even close to the screen. The year after, when Cynefin went independent (eventually as Cognitive Edge Pte.), Dave used my presentation font, Marker Felt Wide, at a minimum of 18pt (but usually 28-36pt). You decide:

Dave has since moved on, but Marker remains my signature font for presentations.

There’s a lot of sage advice about effective presentations these days:

1. Edward Tufte’s “The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint”
2. Don Norman’s “In Defense of PowerPoint”
3. Ian Parker’s “Absolute Powerpoint: Can a software package edit our thoughts?” (New Yorker, May 28, 2001; available here).
4. Cliff Atkinson’s Beyond Bullet Points
5. Guy Kawasaki’s blog category called “Pitching, Presenting & Speaking”

You know, if you want to raise some provocative questions about the dangers of oversimplifying issues and information, look at the role of PowerPoint in planning the Iraq War or judging the safety of a shuttle launch.

For example, in Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, Army Col. Andrew Bacevich (Ret.) tells author Thomas E. Ricks how PowerPoint war planning stripped from the process all of the context of military experience:

Here may be the clearest manifestation of OSD’s contempt for the accumulated wisdom of the military profession and of the assumption among forward thinkers that technology—above all information technology—has rendered obsolete the conventions traditionally governing the preparation and conduct of war. To imagine that PowerPoint slides can substitute for such means is really the height of recklessness.

Anyway, I actually wanted to talk about fonts and readability on the computer screen and printed page, which I guess is going to be a second post…

Comments

[Mary-Louise]

I work for Guy Kawasaki. Thanks for the link to Guy's blog!

Mary-Louise
http://blog.guykawasaki.com/