Why we banned powerpoint

Once upon a time, I unintentionally incited a rebellion in a government department by banning powerpoint.

It was a very important project with a lot of senior people, and everyone was still figuring out what they were doing when we got involved. There was a lot of busywork going on, including two people who were pulling together a powerpoint pack of the history behind the project. At first glance that seemed like a reasonable thing to do, but two weeks later they were still working on it. They didn’t know what it would be used for, had no clear audience outside the project team, and were spending most of their time fussing about layout and fonts.

We estimated based on their salaries that the pack had cost $40,000 by the time we intervened. So in an attempt to get focus back onto the things that mattered, we banned everyone from powerpoint for a week.

It was a shocking move, and we completely underestimated the impact on people. To the point that someone called in sick the next day, and the team appointed a delegation to talk to us about it. The fundamental issue was, these senior leaders couldn’t understand how to do their job if they weren’t creating a pack.

That is an extreme example, but most organisations are guilty of focusing at some level on the output and the communication more than the work that needs doing.

Why is powerpoint such a problem?

The first challenge is that powerpoint starts with the form, not the function or need. Your thinking is constrained by the confines of the report; the headings you’ve included and what you can fit on a page. It gives you the illusion that you’re making sense of things because you’re ordering your thoughts, without helping you to actually think through those things in the way a synthesis process would.

Secondly, it makes it look like it’s finished, which sends a message that further input is not required or desired. It’s easy to create a powerpoint that looks good, but that encourages you to go straight from “thinking” to “finished” without doing the feedback bit in the middle. And that bit — engaging people around your thinking — is far more important than what it looks like at the end.

Why do we like to create polished, finished things?

It’s complicated, and we probably all have different reasons. For the public servants I mentioned earlier, creating the deck was how they framed their job. They knew what they had to do and there was a sense of security and satisfaction in doing it (even if it was the wrong thing).

For designers it’s also about identity. We want what we do to look beautiful, because it represents who we are and the work we’ve done. We think if it looks messy, people will assume the work is messy. But in fact, presenting a work in progress in a polished way is not going to make you look good. You won’t have all of the answers, so why make it look like you do?

A possible way forward

I was recently introduced to the concept of the 10–50–99 approach to feedback (link to medium post) and we’ve since implemented this successfully at one organisation we’ve worked with. The premise is that you both present different materials and ask for different types of feedback, depending on how far through the project you are. So at:

• 0% you might not have anything to support what you’re doing, maybe it’s a conversation about the purpose of the work to see if you’re aligned.
• 10% it’s hand drawn or scribbled notes at best. Maybe you’re even getting people to create something with you. Feedback is conceptual.
• 50% you might have a rough mockup. Feedback is still quite conceptual, checking we’re heading in the right direction.
• 99% it’s pretty polished, and the feedback you’re looking for is spelling and grammar.

I would ban powerpoint at 0, 10, 50, and only use it at 99. It’s easy to put stuff in a powerpoint at 50% but sends the wrong message and won’t give you the response you need.

Having said that, I’d love never to use powerpoint again. I’ve absolutely worked on projects where there has been no polished deliverable at the end, and it’s great. They’re almost without fail impactful projects because the focus is not on the output, but the outcome of the work.