HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_015753.jpg

Understanding
63

than interactively understanding it and agreed on the recommendation that it was safe to return. Clearly they did not understand the ambiguity otherwise they would have realized they did not have enough information to form a conclusion. This is the tragedy of lack of understanding. If they had known how little they knew, they could have deployed a spy satellite to take pictures of the damage – one was available nearby and would have taken a few hours to re-task – but they did not.

Ed Tufte served on the second shuttle disaster commission and provided an analysis of the disaster. He views slides as a poor medium for communicating complex problems and thinks documents are far better. The danger with slides is they force you to simplify information in a way that destroys the essence of the information. His analysis of the failure of communication at NASA formed a major part of the final report on the disaster. Later he coined the paraphrase “All Power corrupts; PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.” Good communication benefits from stories and narrative, not bullet points and graphic fluff. Instead of using bullet points, speak! After all, we have evolved for 250,000 years to understand language, but only 25 to read PowerPoints.’

If you write presentations, Ed Tufte’s book The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint is compulsory reading. He argues that much of the information you want to communicate is complex and interconnected. PowerPoint or any similar presentation software encourages you to simplify it into hierarchical bullets. The format implies simple causal relationships where none exists. This is dangerous. Communication should convey understanding – which is very important – and not just information. What, you ask, is the difference?

HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_015753