Death by PowerPoint: The slide that killed seven people
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Death by PowerPoint: The slide that killed seven people
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Re: Death by PowerPoint: The slide that killed seven people
#2The slide in the article has the same text, but is a recreation of the original (The Calibri typeface used wasn't part of PowerPoint until 2007).
The original slide can be seen in the full report linked in the article:
https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=...
Re: Death by PowerPoint: The slide that killed seven people
#3The slide in the article has the same text, but is a recreation of the original (The Calibri typeface used wasn't part of PowerPoint until 2007). The original slide can be seen in the full report linked in the article: https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=...
Thanks for pointing this out. I noticed the typo of "hanrd" ("hard") on the re-creation and drew the further conclusion that they weren't even taking the issue seriously enough to pay attention to their slide content. Even though it doesn't change what ultimately happened, it's nice to know that someone was paying at least cursory attention.
Re: Death by PowerPoint: The slide that killed seven people
#4The slide in the article has the same text, but is a recreation of the original (The Calibri typeface used wasn't part of PowerPoint until 2007). The original slide can be seen in the full report linked in the article: https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=...
Why would someone recreate that slide instead of just using the original? Gah, that's sloppy reporting. Makes me suspect the entire story told, now that you pointed that out.
Re: Death by PowerPoint: The slide that killed seven people
#5We weren't at the briefing. Surely the briefer could have emphasized these points, rather than just relying on the slide itself to convey the seriousness of the situation. Or, the judgement of the audience to pick up that they hadn't tested for this situation.
I like Tufte as much as anyone else, but he's in the business of selling courses.
Re: Death by PowerPoint: The slide that killed seven people
#6No, the NASA officials are the ones that killed seven people. Is there audio from the presentation? If you are meeting with some group about something that is life or death, you sit your butt down and ask questions until you get the actual situation. They didn't do it for Challenger and they failed to do it for Columbia. You are in charge, the decision is yours and you are responsible.
On a side note, the whole first paragraph is just plain insulting to anyone who is making a life or death decision. If that is the attitude of anyone in the meeting, then they shouldn't have that job.
Re: Death by PowerPoint: The slide that killed seven people
#7I thought this was going to be a more direct kill, as in maybe a slide that flashed bright colors very quickly and killed people who got seizures from it.
Re: Death by PowerPoint: The slide that killed seven people
#8As much as I appreciate the sentiment and I never like to miss a chance to pile on PowerPoint, this is really, really missing the point.
As the CAIB report makes clear, the PowerPoint slide was a small symptom of the actual problem of a complex organization gradually accepting more and more risk as “in family” simply because unexplained phenomena hadn’t caused serious issues before (while remaining unexplained). The CAIB report really is a masterpiece (as is Feynman’s appendix to the Challenger report) of understanding how the understanding of risk can be subjugated to organizational pressures over time.
Re: Death by PowerPoint: The slide that killed seven people
#9No, the NASA officials are the ones that killed seven people. Is there audio from the presentation? If you are meeting with some group about something that is life or death, you sit your butt down and ask questions until you get the actual situation. They didn't do it for Challenger and they failed to do it for Columbia. You are in charge, the decision is yours and you are responsible. On a side note, the whole first…
There’s definitely audio from all those meetings. You can hear the mission manager plow right through the issues with bureaucratic ease. They’ve seen something similar before and even though it was unexplained, because they’ve seen it, they think it’s a known issue.
You want to blame her for it and shake her out of it as you hear her say it, but it wasn’t malicious. I believe the mission manager even had a spouse who was an astronaut, so it’s obviously not like they don’t care. I’ve always found it fascinating how organizational structure and pressure can take really brilliant and motivated people and beat them into making such poor decisions.
It’s really important to remember that these people are not idiots. It’s literally a room of rocket scientists and space shuttle mission managers. It’s so easy for us all to say here that it was so easy to see it happening and that anyone who didn’t ask the right question was a moron, but these structures take on a life of their own. If I had it to start all over again, studying that would make a fascinating and potentially rewarding career.
Re: Death by PowerPoint: The slide that killed seven people
#10Tufte makes a good point that the critical information could have been conveyed so much more effectively.
If only the managers had been given a better summary! But I think this is a vast over-simplification.
Even with a crystal-clear summary of the issues, it doesn't always add up to a clear disaster on your hands. Only in hindsight. The shuttle was an incredibly complex system and there were always issues to examine, to fix, to prioritize, to defer. There is just a lot to regularly weigh.