Death by PowerPoint

Marine Corps General James N. Mattis was quoted in the New York Times as saying this at a recent military conference: “PowerPoint makes us stupid.”

The above chart is one example of how PowerPoint’s limited visualization capacities can make a complicated mess out of complex data, but the software is also a reductionist tool that, through the use of bullet points, oversimplifies information and creates a false sense of understanding. Which, of course, leads to bad decisions. Like war.

Okay, now I’m being reductionist.

But here's a thought. Approximately a month and one-half ago, President Obama appointed design and data visualization hero Edward Tufte to the Recovery Independent Advisory Panel, and he's charged with helping to show us all what’s happening to the billions of dollars in economic stimulus tax money. (To refer to Tufte in such a lofty manner is not reductionist; the man has a cult-like following of graphic designers who speak in reverential tones about how they’ve been influenced by his seminal work,  The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.)

As such, Tufte knows a thing or two about PowerPoint, and I can only hope, on behalf of the American public, that the military will closely watch how Tufte makes sense of economic battles and follow his lead. And if the armed forces haven’t yet done so, I hope they’ll learn something from his 2006 pamphlet, The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within.