The PowerPoint slide that crashed a space shuttle
4 rules to make better presentations
January 16 2003, the Columbia space shuttle mission launched. After liftoff large chunks of spray-on foam insulation (SOFI) broke off from an external tank and struck the left wing. Now Columbia and its seven crew members were orbiting Earth with possible wing damage. Would Coumbia survive re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere or would the wing damage cause the spacecraft to be torn apart?
Some engineers suspected this could be a problem and produced a slide deck for NASA. This was one of the slides they produced:
Ambiguously written slides like this helped reassure NASA officials the damage was incosequential and it was safe to attempt re-entry. On February 1, 2003 Columbia re-entered Earth’s atmosphere at a blistering speed of 5 miles per second. Super-heated gases seeped into cracks in the damaged wing, eroding the wing’s structure and at 9:05 a.m. there was a loud boom and Columbia exploded over Texas. All crew members were lost.
An independent review board conluded that slides like the one above were one of many contributing factors leading to NASA’s fateful and flawed decision to attempt re-entry.
In what follows I’ll try to improve the above slide with 4 rules you can use to improve every presentation.
Rule 1
One of the easiest ways to make slides better is summarizing the key point in the title. Too many slides have generic titles that omit to give extra information to the audience. The goal should be: if someone drops in during your presentation for only 5 seconds, she should know what you’re trying to say from your title.
The NASA engineers did some simulations, but the results were inconclusive as their historic data didn’t contain pieces as large as the ones that hit Columbia. So they wanted to say that they actually didn’t have a clue if there would be a problem or not. They needed extra information in the form of in-orbit photo’s. So let’s put that in the title:
Rule 2
Many presenters are cursed by their knowledge and put everything they know on a slide and just expect the audience will grasp everything and make conclusions by themselves. Our brain’s working memory can only hold 3 to 4 chunks of information at once. So when presenting we should make sure we never bombard our audience with more than 3 to 4 things.
On the NASA slide, there are 4 core messages:
- The simulations predicted a complete penetration
- The results however are inconclusive because there’s no historic data on chunks of insulation of this size
- If the heat tiles were hit, there wouldn’t be a problem
- If the wing is struck, there would be a problem
Rule 3
In a lot of “how to make better presentation” guides you’ll find that bullet points are evil. But actually bullet points are helpfull to make your core points stand out. The reason bullet points are considered evil is because many presenters overuse them and overload the working memory (see rule 2 above). So don’t be afraid to use bullet points as long as you have 4 or less, but avoid sub-bullets.
Let’s combine the three rules on the NASA slide and we come up with this revamped slide:
Rule 4
Pictures always resonate better with audiences when giving a presentation. Use them as much as possible.
The NASA engineers could have started with a slide like this to introduce the problem:
The rules & slides above are part of the presentation framework we created at Bluegrass. It’s based on numerous books, blogs and presentations we have read and watched. The Columbia slide is also discussed in “Speaking Powerpoint: the new language of business”, which I highly recommend.
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