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Death by PowerPoint: The slide that killed seven people
11–20 of 135 posts
Re: Death by PowerPoint: The slide that killed seven people
#12No, 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…
Yeah, it's clear that the slide was poorly written, but it seems very odd to put the lion's share of the blame on the people who presented accurate information poorly, instead of the people who thought it was okay to merely skim a Why on Earth did they veto even doing a spacewalk to inspect the damage, before concluding it was safe?
Re: Death by PowerPoint: The slide that killed seven people
#13No, 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…
It is a little far fetched to think the audience didn't listen or ask questions about any potential risks.
It's easy to go back after an accident and find multiple points of failure and find things that could have been done better.
My guess is that most people thought it was a minor or acceptable risk. Unfortunately, they were very wrong.
But that doesn't mean the PPT slide is at fault.
Re: Death by PowerPoint: The slide that killed seven people
#14No, 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…
I completely agree. Powerpoint may cause information to be lost, or encourage sloppy speaking skills. But the deaths regarding "NASA's powerpoint that kills" is squarely on the chuckleheads who didn't sit down and get to brass tacks and ask the hard questions.
Powerpoint didn't stop NASA employees from asking "What are the chances of a catastrophic result?"
In times of critical issues, you ask plain and direct questions. You will always be given caveats, muddled answers, and "but ifs". As a decisionmaker, it's your job to 'cut the crap'.
Re: Death by PowerPoint: The slide that killed seven people
#15Perl is still living in their Hamlet fodder world
Re: Death by PowerPoint: The slide that killed seven people
#16No, 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…
Yeah, it's clear that the slide was poorly written, but it seems very odd to put the lion's share of the blame on the people who presented accurate information poorly, instead of the people who thought it was okay to merely skim a Why on Earth did they veto even doing a spacewalk to inspect the damage, before concluding it was safe?
I don’t agree. I work in the Danish public sector, which means we handle healthcare related software that could potentially lead to deaths.
Our managers aren’t technical wizards, and especially not in the field of healthcare. They are mostly doctors with a masters in management. Their job is to listen to what everyone has to say, and then make a decision based on that.
Our job is to make sure they don’t miss important points related to subjects they may not fully understand. Burying a “may cause significant damage” on a text-heavy slide like that is simply put poor communication.
It should’ve been the only words on a slide, it should have been in bold red, and, it should have said “if you ignore this, people may die”.
Re: Death by PowerPoint: The slide that killed seven people
#17No, 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…
Yeah, it's clear that the slide was poorly written, but it seems very odd to put the lion's share of the blame on the people who presented accurate information poorly, instead of the people who thought it was okay to merely skim a Why on Earth did they veto even doing a spacewalk to inspect the damage, before concluding it was safe?
Spacewalks are neither free nor totally safe either. It is possible they calculated that the risk of a spacewalk and the time it would take to do that was worse than attempting re-entry. They were probably wrong, but it's not a free operation.
Re: Death by PowerPoint: The slide that killed seven people
#18No, 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…
I completely agree. Powerpoint may cause information to be lost, or encourage sloppy speaking skills. But the deaths regarding "NASA's powerpoint that kills" is squarely on the chuckleheads who didn't sit down and get to brass tacks and ask the hard questions. Powerpoint didn't stop NASA employees from asking "What are the chances of a catastrophic result?" In times of critical issues, you ask plain and direct questi…
> Powerpoint didn't stop NASA employees from asking "What are the chances of a catastrophic result?"
But the bureaucratic morass that Powerpoint embodies does cause people to stop asking questions like this in all forms of industry. You have probably seen it - at much lower stakes - in business, finance, or IT.
The post is picking at the nits of Powerpoint's layout, which I agree with you, seems silly. But the broader picture to blame meeting culture is quite accurate.
Re: Death by PowerPoint: The slide that killed seven people
#19As 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…
> 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.
Agreed. It is a useful document to read for anyone who plans meetings and heavily relies on consensus to see where the problems lay. You need outsiders and first principles thinkers (physicists are good options, as Feynman always demonstrates) to disrupt bureaucratic agreement.
Re: Death by PowerPoint: The slide that killed seven people
#20> They rejected the other options
I didn’t think there were any options. Indeed the managers didn’t think so.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Columbia_disaste...
> Throughout the risk assessment process, senior NASA managers were influenced by their belief that nothing could be done even if damage were detected.
However the CAIB determined Atlantis could have been used as a rescue vehicle had NASA acted quickly enough. It also put forth a high risk repair procedure:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Columbia_disaste...