588 - Powerful Rant About PowerPoint - Dumb Dumb Bullets
August 25, 2009 Learning TRENDS by Elliott Masie - August 25, 2009.
#588 - Updates on Learning, Business & Technology.
54,781 Readers - http://www.masie.com - The MASIE Center.
Host - Learning 2009 - Nov 8-11 - Orlando, Florida
1. A Powerful Rant about PowerPoint - “Dumb-Dumb Bullets”
2. Emergency Preparation and Roles for Learning Departments
1. A Powerful Rant about PowerPoint! I just read a very powerful rant in the Armed Forces Journal about the destructive use of PowerPoint - in terms of thinking and decision making. Here is a short excerpt and a link to the full article called “Dumb-Dumb Bullets” by T.X. Hammes (Retired Marine Corps).
“Every year, the services spend millions of dollars teaching our people how to think. We invest in everything from war colleges to noncommissioned officer schools. Our senior schools in particular expose our leaders to broad issues and historical insights in an attempt to expose the complex and interactive nature of many of the decisions they will make.”
“Unfortunately, as soon as they graduate, our people return to a world driven by a tool that is the antithesis of thinking: PowerPoint. Make no mistake, PowerPoint is not a neutral tool — it is actively hostile to thoughtful decision-making. It has fundamentally changed our culture by altering the expectations of who makes decisions, what decisions they make and how they make them. While this may seem to be a sweeping generalization, I think a brief examination of the impact of PowerPoint will support this statement.”
“The last point, how we make decisions, is the most obvious. Before PowerPoint, staffs prepared succinct two- or three-page summaries of key issues. The decision-maker would read a paper, have time to think it over and then convene a meeting with either the full staff or just the experts involved to discuss the key points of the paper. Of course, the staff involved in the discussion would also have read the paper and had time to prepare to discuss the issues. In contrast, today, a decision-maker sits through a 20-minute PowerPoint presentation followed by five minutes of discussion and then is expected to make a decision. Compounding the problem, often his staff will have received only a five-minute briefing from the action officer on the way to the presentation and thus will not be well-prepared to discuss the issues. This entire process clearly has a toxic effect on staff work and decision-making.”
For the complete article, go to http://www.afji.com/2009/07/4061641
I’d love to hear your thoughts at emasie@masie.com
2. Emergency Preparation and Roles for Learning Departments: In recent weeks, I have been in conversation with quite a few Chief Learning Officers about how they are building more robust Emergency Prep plans for their Learning Departments. How well prepared is your Learning function to support the organization at the time of an extreme emergency - from bans on travel (in case of a Pandemic or Crisis) to the ability to drop intense learning and support resources into a region facing a disaster? This is a good time for learning professionals to reach out to their “continuity” teams and engage them for an expanded role in these situations. Our skills and technology platforms can be of great assistance. We will have a series of sessions at Learning 2009, focused on Emergency Prep and Roles for Learning Departments.
Elliott Masie
Contact: emasie@masie.com
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