You know, silly as the slide is, of course it doesn't have any kind of a real plan on it -- it's a Power Point slide. The point is to have it up while you talk about the details. Now, the results indicate that no one had much of a plan beyond what's on the slide, but the emptiness of the slide isn't independent evidence for that.
True, as far as it goes, but it's hard for me to resist thinking, while looking at that slide and thinking about the last few years, that not only was there no plan to back up the slide, but that some people took that to be the plan.
This might be based on context. John's post quotes Thomas Ricks:
[Army Lt. General David] McKiernan had another, smaller but nagging issue: He couldn’t get Franks to issue clear orders that stated explicitly what he wanted done, how he wanted to do it, and why. Rather, Franks passed along PowerPoint briefing slides that he had shown to Rumsfeld: "It’s quite frustrating the way this works, but the way we do things nowadays is combatant commanders brief their products in PowerPoint up in Washington to OSD and Secretary of Defense…In lieu of an order, or a frag [fragmentary order], or plan, you get a bunch of PowerPoint slides…[T]hat is frustrating, because nobody wants to plan against PowerPoint slides."
That reliance on slides rather than formal written orders seemed to some military professionals to capture the essence of Rumsfeld’s amateurish approach to war planning. "Here may be the clearest manifestation of OSD’s contempt for the accumulated wisdom of the military profession and of the assumption among forward thinkers that technology—above all information technology—has rendered obsolete the conventions traditionally governing the preparation and conduct of war," commented retired Army Col. Andrew Bacevich, a former commander of an armored cavalry regiment. "To imagine that PowerPoint slides can substitute for such means is really the height of recklessness." It was like telling an automobile mechanic to use a manufacturer’s glossy sales brochure to figure out how to repair an engine.
All I know about PowerPoint slides comes from artists' satirical renderings, but this thing is more hilarious than I could have dreamed. I look at it, and I can't imagine any lecture that makes it make sense. The three circles representing "tribe," "religion," and that third thing, why are they separated at the left and grouped at the right? What operation does the funnel perform? Are the left to right pressure-arrows ordered by time? If the rendering is purely aesthetic, the funnel-thingie should be slightly scaled down, moved to the left, and some external object should be on the lower mid-right--a square representing the safe and oblivious American voting public, perhaps?
"As you can see here, on the left of the slide, things are bad. As we move towards the right, observe how they get better. Questions?"
3: I did see that, and it is terrifying. But (oh, maybe I'm still being naive) I can't imagine that it's really true. I mean, what would you do if someone gave you a slide like that and told you to act on it? Other than dressing up as Uncle Sam and doing pirouettes, to represent the graphical elements, I can't think of what the indicated course of action would be.
Don't you all remember these questions being asked at press conferences pre-invastion, and having the administration say, literally, "we'll be greeted as liberators"? They never had a plan. It was clear at the time they didn't have a plan.
But don't you see that even if the plan were unworkably vague, it should have had a balancing compositional element? Also, I want to see the Pentagon work more in color.
Oh, you know there was color in the original. This thing was screaming in red white and blue. There were also probably animations -- each graphical element zoomed in from off-screen somehow.
Those three ovals at the right look vaguely uterine, while the three circles and the little box at the left look vaguely testicular. What a surprise that the result was a clusterfuck.
3 illustrates the real danger of PowerPoint as a social technology. People begin to think the .ppt is the presentation, rather than just an illustration of the presentation.
Tufte illustrated it best.
This is so horrifyingly familiar. Takes me back to working as a contractor for the Navy, not coincidentally immediately before I quit my old job. I was working off of a software specification that made exactly as much sense as this slide, but also had the benefit of being spread out over 1000+ illogically cross-referenced pages.
I furrowed my brow and tried to figure it out for a while, assuming that there must be a way to turn it into something sensible. But eventually I realized that in bureacracies of military size, it takes so long for anyone to notice anything that it's possible to generate meaningless paper for the length of an entire career without anyone catching on. You just keep shoving it around until it trickles down the chain.
Eventually someone gets stuck with turning it into productive work. Being that person is terrible. You don't know what you're supposed to be doing, the tasks you're being asked to accomplish haven't been thought about seriously, the higher ups have already wasted most of the time and resources originally allocated to the project, and if the end result is deemed a failure you'll immediately be offered up as a sacrifice, thanks to your inability to decipher to the incomprehensible instructions coming from above.
Wait, where am I?
Oh yeah! The punchline: I quit, then they shipped the project to India. Then someone probably got promoted.
I'm sort of used to reading these.
It doesn't say much, of course. Powerpoint slides aren't known for density of information. What it does say is that Phase 3 (but note the pompous Roman numeral, as in the Superbowl) will achieve stability and security as a result of military victory and then there will be phased delegation of authority as things quiet down until the military is out of it.
If that was the plan, then military victory has not yet been achieved.
Yeah, the awesome badness of powerpoint is only now being fully appreciated. See my forthcoming article "How to do a terrible teaching presentation using snazzy graphic effects."
People begin to think the .ppt is the presentation
So true, so deadly.
15: Is that a real article?
I gave such a talk at the 2004 AAPT, under the title "Is PowerPoint Stalinist?"
My only goal for the annual conference I'm planning for our grantees is to forbid using Powerpoint.
The slide is just fine, except for the typo where they left out "then a miracle occurs."
Probably the correction was made orally at the presentation.
