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PowerPoint... the bully in the room
We have strong feelings about PowerPoint at Accounting Comes Alive. Mostly we are averse to it. PowerPoint brings new meaning to the 'bully' in bully pulpit. It allows a presenter to overbearingly dominate an audience and an agenda. It shifts the balance of engagement even further towards the presenter and away from the audience. It can cut discussion short - if not prevent it at all. It can prevent new ideas emerging and discourage a facilitator from being spontaneous and scintillating. Not to mention it is often used badly with too-small font and too many words. At it's best, it can align a group on a cogent train of thought & discovery, and focus the discussion precisely on a singular point.
When the space shuttle Columbia disaster happened in 2003 is was suggested that PowerPoint was partly to blame. This because a culture had set in at NASA of over-using the presentation technology in meetings. It had stifled discussion and prevented dissenting ideas being expressed, killing a habit of healthy debate.
In Color Accounting workshops we'd usually much rather have whiteboards, slightly wonky lines, inky fingers and the craft of board-work to communicate the points and facilitate the discovery that we love to do. We want the trainer to be having a kinesthetic experience just like the participants. Sometimes if the learning group is too large we might use an animated slideshow that represents concepts using the Color Accounting Framework. But it's not our first choice. We approach PowerPoint with caution.
And so it was with interest that I read a piece in the Wall Street Journal last week about Robert Gates, the US Defense Secretary. He is well known for shaking up the Pentagon and the US Military after the terrible period when Donald Rumsfeld was the Secretary. Rumsfeld confused real leadership with barking orders. He used to issues memos about everything, including one that said the slices of lemon in his tea were too thick. But his underlings quickly realized that there was no follow through and no consequence for failing to obey a Rumsfeld memo, so they ignored them. By contrast, Robert Gates has focused on what’s truly important at the Pentagon and sought to understand the nature of a bureaucracy.
“The natural propensity of a bureaucracy is not to decide” says Gates. “It will just chew the cud until there is no taste at all”.
Whereas Rumsfeld let debates over weapons programs drag on for months, Gates sets deadlines of weeks or even days. Meetings with top generals rarely run more than 45 minutes.
Which is where we get to the issue of PowerPoint…
Gates demands that all briefing slides from his staff and military commanders reach his office the day before the meeting in which they will be discussed. With the slides in hand he plots how he wants to drive the discussion. If slides arrive after the deadline, the meeting will be canceled or postponed.
We, like the Secretary of Defense, know the power of PowerPoint - both its dangers and its virtues. That's why you don't see a lot of it in a Color Accounting session.
When the space shuttle Columbia disaster happened in 2003 is was suggested that PowerPoint was partly to blame. This because a culture had set in at NASA of over-using the presentation technology in meetings. It had stifled discussion and prevented dissenting ideas being expressed, killing a habit of healthy debate.
In Color Accounting workshops we'd usually much rather have whiteboards, slightly wonky lines, inky fingers and the craft of board-work to communicate the points and facilitate the discovery that we love to do. We want the trainer to be having a kinesthetic experience just like the participants. Sometimes if the learning group is too large we might use an animated slideshow that represents concepts using the Color Accounting Framework. But it's not our first choice. We approach PowerPoint with caution.
And so it was with interest that I read a piece in the Wall Street Journal last week about Robert Gates, the US Defense Secretary. He is well known for shaking up the Pentagon and the US Military after the terrible period when Donald Rumsfeld was the Secretary. Rumsfeld confused real leadership with barking orders. He used to issues memos about everything, including one that said the slices of lemon in his tea were too thick. But his underlings quickly realized that there was no follow through and no consequence for failing to obey a Rumsfeld memo, so they ignored them. By contrast, Robert Gates has focused on what’s truly important at the Pentagon and sought to understand the nature of a bureaucracy.
“The natural propensity of a bureaucracy is not to decide” says Gates. “It will just chew the cud until there is no taste at all”.
Whereas Rumsfeld let debates over weapons programs drag on for months, Gates sets deadlines of weeks or even days. Meetings with top generals rarely run more than 45 minutes.
Which is where we get to the issue of PowerPoint…
Gates demands that all briefing slides from his staff and military commanders reach his office the day before the meeting in which they will be discussed. With the slides in hand he plots how he wants to drive the discussion. If slides arrive after the deadline, the meeting will be canceled or postponed.
We, like the Secretary of Defense, know the power of PowerPoint - both its dangers and its virtues. That's why you don't see a lot of it in a Color Accounting session.
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Mark Robilliard on -
This discussion is great and highlighted by what happened to me recently while running an in-house Color Accounting workshop session for a client. We did the 3 modules of Colour Accounting and the participants really loved the material. They picked it up very fast and were soon off on all sorts of related topics with gusto. We had convinced the CFO for the client to run the discussion for the final piece of the workshop - to make accounting come alive in their business world. He was nervous and did not have the confidence to facilitate a round table discussion so, out came the Powerpoint presentation. It completely killed the energy and conversation in the room, particularly when he started off by 'lecturing at them'. But, he had some quite interesting handouts on their cash cycles so to his credit he switched focus to the handouts, reinstated social conversation and basically forgot about the PP presentation. This saved the day and he felt pretty good about the compliments he received for 'talking straight at our level'. He was also quite amazed at the participant's newly-acquired capacity to discuss these concepts in a very business-like way.
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