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We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint

(from the New York Times)

WASHINGTON — Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the leader of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, was shown a PowerPoint slide in Kabul last summer that was meant to portray the complexity of American military strategy, but looked more like a bowl of spaghetti.

“When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war,” General McChrystal dryly remarked, one of his advisers recalled, as the room erupted in laughter.

The slide has since bounced around the Internet as an example of a military tool that has spun out of control. Like an insurgency, PowerPoint has crept into the daily lives of military commanders and reached the level of near obsession. The amount of time expended on PowerPoint, the Microsoft presentation program of computer-generated charts, graphs and bullet points, has made it a running joke in the Pentagon and in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“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.)

“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.”

In General McMaster’s view, PowerPoint’s worst offense is not a chart like the spaghetti graphic, which was first uncovered by NBC’s Richard Engel, but rigid lists of bullet points (in, say, a presentation on a conflict’s causes) that take no account of interconnected political, economic and ethnic forces. “If you divorce war from all of that, it becomes a targeting exercise,” General McMaster said.

Commanders say that behind all the PowerPoint jokes are serious concerns that the program stifles discussion, critical thinking and thoughtful decision-making. Not least, it ties up junior officers — referred to as PowerPoint Rangers — in the daily preparation of slides, be it for a Joint Staff meeting in Washington or for a platoon leader’s pre-mission combat briefing in a remote pocket of Afghanistan.

Last year when a military Web site, Company Command, asked an Army platoon leader in Iraq, Lt. Sam Nuxoll, how he spent most of his time, he responded, “Making PowerPoint slides.” When pressed, he said he was serious.

“I have to make a storyboard complete with digital pictures, diagrams and text summaries on just about anything that happens,” Lieutenant Nuxoll told the Web site. “Conduct a key leader engagement? Make a storyboard. Award a microgrant? Make a storyboard.”

Despite such tales, “death by PowerPoint,” the phrase used to described the numbing sensation that accompanies a 30-slide briefing, seems here to stay. The program, which first went on sale in 1987 and was acquired by Microsoft soon afterward, is deeply embedded in a military culture that has come to rely on PowerPoint’s hierarchical ordering of a confused world.

“There’s a lot of PowerPoint backlash, but I don’t see it going away anytime soon,” said Capt. Crispin Burke, an Army operations officer at Fort Drum, N.Y.

Gen. David H. Petraeus, who oversees the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and says that sitting through some PowerPoint briefings is “just agony,” nonetheless likes the program for the display of maps and statistics showing trends. He has also conducted more than a few PowerPoint presentations himself.

Commanders say that the slides impart less information than a five-page paper can hold, and that they relieve the briefer of the need to polish writing to convey an analytic, persuasive point. Imagine lawyers presenting arguments before the Supreme Court in slides instead of legal briefs.

Captain Burke’s essay in the Small Wars Journal also cited a widely read attack on PowerPoint in Armed Forces Journal last summer by Thomas X. Hammes, a retired Marine colonel, whose title, “Dumb-Dumb Bullets,” underscored criticism of fuzzy bullet points; “accelerate the introduction of new weapons,” for instance, does not actually say who should do so.

No one is suggesting that PowerPoint is to blame for mistakes in the current wars, but the program did become notorious during the prelude to the invasion of Iraq. As recounted in the book “Fiasco” by Thomas E. Ricks (Penguin Press, 2006), Lt. Gen. David D. McKiernan, who led the allied ground forces in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, grew frustrated when he could not get Gen. Tommy R. Franks, the commander at the time of American forces in the Persian Gulf region, to issue orders that stated explicitly how he wanted the invasion conducted, and why. Instead, General Franks just passed on to General McKiernan the vague PowerPoint slides that he had already shown to Donald H. Rumsfeld, the defense secretary at the time.

Senior officers say the program does come in handy when the goal is not imparting information, as in briefings for reporters.

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.”

Helene Cooper contributed reporting.

The Power of Anticipation

(republished from 501Places.com)

It’s the way you tell ‘em: the art of storytelling

There’s an old joke that goes something like this:

A man walks into a pub. It’s in the middle of nowhere and full of local folk. He orders his drink and sits next to the bar. There’s a lot of general chatter taking place among the locals. Suddenly one man stands up and shouts “Forty two!” The whole pub erupts in laughter. The stranger is confused. A short while later another man yells out “Sixty seven!” and again there is a riotous reaction. By now the stranger is intrigued and asks the man next to him what’s going on. “It’s quite simple” he explains. “We’ve all been coming here for years, and we’ve all told every joke that we know many times. So we decided just to give each joke a number, and now we just shout out the number and the rest of us remember the joke.”

The stranger is fascinated and asks if he can have a go, to which his new friend readily agrees. He plucks up his courage and shouts out “Twenty seven!!” Deathly silence. You can hear the wind from the moors howling through the creaky window frames of the old pub. Dejected the man returns to his drink. Just then one of the regulars stands up and yells “Twenty seven!” and receives the loudest reaction of the night.

The stranger is now very frustrated and turns to his companion and says “I don’t get it. He shouted the same number as I did, but they didn’t laugh at all for me.” The friendly local puts a consoling arm around the stranger and says “Ah, but it’s the way you tell ‘em”.

Whether we are writing blogs or telling jokes, we are practising the art of story-telling. And just like the man said in this tale, how well people relate to our message is determined by our audience’s perception of how we tell the story. If we can create a feeling of anticipation, of people caring what comes next, of identfying personally with elements of the story, then our message carries so much more power, whatever the subject.

I remember vividly an evening in a modest quarter of Bucharest in a family garden. There must have been around 20 people there, including 3 of us Brits. As the alcohol flowed and the stories got more boisterous, one man seemed to sparkle as the comedian and storyteller. I could make out no more than half of what he was saying; enough to get the gist, but not enough to understand the fine nuances of his stories. From our limited vocabulary it was clear that the jokes were getting blue, and when he asked us for a contribution we had a discussion and agreed on a joke that I certainly won’t repeat here.

Between us we quietly and laboriously told him our joke in broken Romanian, no doubt murdering the punchline in the process. He paused at the end of our effort, thought for a moment and then stood up and began to deliver our joke to the expectant audience. It was an unforgettable moment, and this guy showed a talent that should have made a good living as a comedian. He wove his own jokes into the story, adding wild gestures and hilarious facial expressions, and long before he reached the punchline we were all in hysterics; more at his superb rendition of our story than at the decidedly average quality of the punchline. He had us spellbound, and we didn’t even understand half of what he was saying!

He demonstrated to me that a great storyteller can shine out even when an audience doesn’t understand every word. Storytelling isn’t about getting every fact lined up in the right order, or about ensuring that you have the perfect structure to your yarn. Instead we are more likely to judge a good story by how we perceive the messenger than by the words we read or hear.

“Thirty eight!”

Original article is here: http://www.501places.com/2010/03/its-way-you-tell-em-the-art-of-storytelling/