The Good, the Bad and the PowerPoint

Richard Cooper, London, UK

Last week I was in Paris coaching Joe, a marketing vice president for a telecommunications company based in California. Next day he was speaking to about four hundred stakeholders and industry analysts. During our rehearsal, he brought up a PowerPoint slide, an intricately gridded and noded flowchart with Internet cloud in the middle, and quipped to the "audience" (that is, to me, a video camera and some captivated chairs), "Sometimes you just want to tell your customers, 'Relax, pay no attention to that man behind the cloud.'" Later in the feedback I said, "Europeans are not necessarily going to pick up on your allusion to The Wizard of Oz¹, even if your usual American audiences don't miss a beat."

Joe said, "That's true. I've even taken it to another level of obscurity by substituting curtain for cloud. Hey, do I do this often?" Joe suddenly wanted to go through the whole video, trawling for whenever he strayed the least oblique. Being a good speaker, Joe knew in his gut that his effectiveness with audiences, this audience, any audience, was all about being clear and to message. The Oz thing came from cultural reservoirs he taps regularly into, instinctively searching to establish and deepen a shared sense of community with his audience with each and every one of these references. But these communities work only when the audience and speaker can both connect to the references.

In a sense, building these connections between speaker and audience is what public speaking is about and what PowerPoint risks missing out on. That said, asserting community is not the sole purpose of a talk (though it's easy to imagine political contexts when it is), but a means to encourage audience receptivity, a sort of tribal multitrack caffeine emphatically and crucially pumped into the talk that instills attention and can facilitate openness. Who on the other hand should seriously consider outsourcing their public speaking needs to a software whose core feature is called "AutoContent Wizard"? Well, a lot of people do. According to Microsoft, 30 million PowerPoint presentations get given a day, with nearly 300 million versions of the software out there, or 95 percent of the slideware market. And it's still growing. You have to wonder whether AutoContent and company might be becoming more than just an inert, malleable template but the way human beings expect information to be presented and validated. Ian Parker, in his 2001 New Yorker article, "Absolute PowerPoint", writes, "The usual metaphor for everyday software is the tool, but that doesn't seem to be right here. PowerPoint is more like a suit of clothes, or a car, or plastic surgery. You take it out with you. You are judged by it-you insist on being judged by it. It is by definition a social instrument."

In The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint, Edward Tufte has even graver concerns. "The fans of PowerPoint are presenters, rarely audience members. PowerPoint convenience for the speaker can be costly to both content and audience. These costs result from the cognitive style characteristic of the standard default PP presentation: foreshortening of evidence and thought, low spatial resolution, a deeply hierarchical single-path structure as the model for organizing every type of content, breaking up narrative and data into slides and minimal fragments, rapid temporal sequencing of thin information rather focused spatial analysis, conspicuous decoration and Phluff, a preoccupation with format not content; an attitude of commercialism that turns everything into a sales pitch." While there is no consolation in imagining a pristine world of stunning speakers before the advent of PowerPoint, it seems even more naïve to assume despite the ubiquity of the slideware that essentially nothing about public speaking has changed. By the way, Microsoft is only the current purveyor of the software. The initial offering, PowerPoint 1.0, released in April 1987, ran only on Macintosh. So regardless who is at the till, but especially since the software's bundling in the mid '90s with the Windows Office platform, PowerPoint has proven spectacularly successful.

At the heart of reservations about the software is the near Everyman audience experience of disorientation and boredom from mile after mile of densely worded slides. But more than that, it is how the software has become the one-stop-shopping-place where a presentation can be conceived, gestated, delivered and handed out or email-attached as stand-alone "hardcopy". Misgivings can seem as if a clash of civilizations where a pastoral, unplugged Luddite confronts the slippery sloped, thoroughly modern. Parker quotes Tony Kurz, the vice-president for sales and marketing of a New York-based Internet company, as saying, "I love PowerPoint. It's a brilliant application. I can take you through at exactly the pace I want to take you." And there's Steven Pinker, author of The Blank Slate and a psychology professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who says that PowerPoint can give visual shape to an argument. Quoted in the Parker article, Pinker says, "Language is a linear medium: one damn word after another. But ideas are multidimensional... When properly employed, PowerPoint makes the logical structure of an argument more transparent. Two channels sending the same information are better than one."

But I'm not saying a good speaker is hard to find who's decided to embrace PowerPoint. My coachee, Joe, mentioned at the beginning of this article, is an articulate, caring, highly informed speaker who uses PowerPoint free of any smoker-like shame that this is really really bad for me. I'm reminded of Renoir, who was fond of saying he was a better painter with a broom than a lot of people with the best of brushes. PowerPoint doesn't distress every speech or destabilize every sincerity. The worry ultimately is that there are a lot of talented people out there spending hours formating slides because working at PowerPoint has come to mean what preparing a presentation is about rather than concentrating on what they are actually going to say. Just think, as you read this millions of people around the world are pondering over the takeaway complexities of Comic Sans MC versus Times, Twenty-four point versus Eighteen, six bullet points or seven, or comparing samples of wallpaper.

Clifford Nass, a professor of sociology at Stanford, is quoted in Parker as saying PowerPoint "lifts the floor" of public speaking. "Students' gain is a lot more information, not just facts but rules, ways of thinking, examples." But at same time, PowerPoint "lowers the ceiling. What you miss is the process. The classes I remember most, the professors I remember most, were the ones where you could watch how they thought. You don't remember what they said, the details. It was 'What an elegant way to wrap around a problem!' PowerPoint takes that away. PowerPoint gives you the outcome, but it removes the process."

Software should not be used because it has attained a dress code status for speech making. It should not do double duty as presentation driver and hardcopy for later reading. It should not be an outsourcing of one's train of thought or of the conceptual framework of the whole enchilada. It should not be essentially a speaker's resource at all but the audiences', not an aide de memoire but a cogent contributor to understanding. Slideware-based talks should not become a Peter-principled suitcase that regardless of size keeps filling to bursting with slides. Slideware should not tempt speakers to cede the human connection with the audience in deference to a never ending word flow, multitasking the preparation of the next slide while the previous sentence is still out there being said in autopilot, a stunning achievement of parallel processing if only it were genuinely conscious. Or the speaker who compliantly and methodically serves up slides but never actually looks at them much less interacts with them, providing the speech outline as a sort of ignored sidekick screensaver that the audience over time, having attempted to absorb both, opts ultimately for the serenity of neither.

There are audiences who crave for a power breakdown. Others are militant like Pinker that slideware in the right hands takes discourse to another level. Both are probably right. Only one thing is sure, no one wants the speaker to succeed more than they do, the audience. No one wants to endure, speaker or attendee, another opaque performance in communication where the conclusion arrives like an answered prayer. Which brings me back to the Wizard of Oz image brought to mind by Joe. It would serve everyone's interest, that of the audience, the stakeholders, the people who calculate the total cost of presence of all involved, but above all the speaker herself and her own process and outcome goals, if the man behind the curtain (by which I mean the slideware and its components) paid less attention to the curtain, stepped out and told her story just as she feels it in her heart. It's only when you know what you want to say that you know what slides you need.

Dorothy, Scarecrow, Cowardly Lion and Tin Man performed their labor for the Wizard and brought the broom of the Wicked Witch of the West. While being tormented with still more taunts by the Wizard's awful image on a big screen, Toto the real live dog pulls back a curtain revealing an unassuming man operating a machine. At this point the demystified Wizard utters his famous line (to Americans at least), as he fiddles at knobs so that his big screen image shouts, "Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!"

References

Ian Parker, "Absolute PowerPoint", reprint from The New Yorker, May 28, 2001. Accessed February 11, 2005. Available from http://www.physics.ohio-state.edu/~wilkins/group/powerpt.html
Edward Tufts, The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint, Cheshire, Connecticut: Graphic Press, 2003.

Bio data

Richard Cooper is a speech coach and trainer, a long time EFL practitioner and author of publications such as Headway Video Intermediate Activity Book and Video Guide, Mad for Ads II, and Les langues par la vidéo. He lives in Bombay.

Contact

Richard Cooper
International Training Consultant, Ltd
30 Holland Street London W8 4LT United Kingdom
+44 (0)207 938 1324 m +44 (0)7866 8080 51 richardcooper@attglobal.net

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