Death by PowerPoint: the slide that killed seven people (2019) • Hacker News Board

Re: Death by PowerPoint: the slide that killed seven people (2019)

#171

Post by 0xffff2 » Wed, Mar 09, 2022, 9:23 PM UTC

brimble wrote: post #19

stuff4ben wrote: post #15

I've seen presentations with Powerpoint that suck the life out of you and also ones that inspire and excite. It's not the tool, it's the presenter and how they wield the tool. Reading word for word off a text-heavy deck in a monotone with no images or diagrams is a recipe for disaster. I tend to have my decks (back when I was doing presentations) be relatively text-lite and involve images/diagrams that back up my tal…

PowerPoint decks for the upper tiers of an organization can take on a whole different character. I shit you not that it's common to pass them around in email as if they were a document format, even for information that is never intended or expected to be presented. As if they were PDFs or something. It's crazy. [EDIT] There's also a kind of horrendous, illegible house style some places, that's expected to be how thes…

> I wouldn't be surprised if that weird, seemingly-intentionally-hard-to-read style is also present in at least some parts of NASA, especially up at the administration level.

Unfortunately I direct experience and it's definitely present in some parts of NASA. We have increasingly been doing away with presentations when reporting updates up the chain. Just shoehorn your work into a single poorly designed slide and lob it over the fence. Your project manager rolls up your slide with everyone else's and lobs that deck over the fence to the program management. Hey, at least it's one fewer meeting.

Re: Death by PowerPoint: the slide that killed seven people (2019)

#172

Post by the_snooze » Wed, Mar 09, 2022, 9:28 PM UTC

cryptonector wrote: post #167

the_snooze wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Most slide decks I ever see I see long after they are presented. As a result I want slide decks to stand alone -- that or else video to be published instead of slide decks. I use presenter notes precisely for what you're describing. My actual slides are sparse, but I distribute slides with full presenter notes so all the main points get across in a written form after the fact, without distracting from the talk. In P…

Presenter notes though are intended to help the presenter, and their form is not great for users who missed the presentation. As well, the presenter often does need presenter notes that are terse and not suitable for the public. We need slides that are shown at the presentation, slides not shown at the presentation but which are public, and presenter notes.

I think that's the presenter's responsibility. I use the presenter notes to organize my thoughts. By the time I give a talk, I already have most things memorized and only need to grab a few phrases here and there from my (rather detailed full-sentence) notes. The notes easily stand on their own.

It's certainly an improvement over the usual ineffective way people make slides and give talks: by reading bullet points off the slides themselves. I keep over 90% of the text for my talks in the presenter notes. It's equally useful for prepration and for future reference.

Re: Death by PowerPoint: the slide that killed seven people (2019)

#173

Post by hbn » Wed, Mar 09, 2022, 9:31 PM UTC

gambiting wrote: post #47

tgflynn wrote: post #27

> There were a number of options. The astronauts could perform a spacewalk and visually inspect the hull. NASA could launch another Space Shuttle to pick the crew up. Or they could risk re-entry. That's not how I remember it being presented to the public. The official word at the time was that there were no feasible rescue options. Yes, they could have done a spacewalk to inspect the damage but if it had been bad the…

Yeah I definitely remember reading a full analysis about what would be required to actually launch a second shuttle in time to rescue them, and it would require nothing less than war effort for an operation never attempted before, and of which literally every single part would have to work first try, with no delays, and even then there was barely enough time to do it.

If this is true then it's increasingly bold of this article's author to blame the deaths of 7 astronauts on a single engineer for not getting the information hierarchy correct on a powerpoint

Re: Death by PowerPoint: the slide that killed seven people (2019)

#174

Post by pklausler » Wed, Mar 09, 2022, 9:32 PM UTC

endymi0n wrote: post #163

codeflo wrote: post #29

Linked from Tufte’s article, I found this interesting comment from someone’s experience at Microsoft: [1] > Attempting to have slides serve both as projected visuals and as stand-alone handouts makes for bad visuals and bad documentation. Yet, this is a typical, acceptable approach. PowerPoint (or Keynote) is a tool for displaying visual information, information that helps you tell your story, make your case, or prov…

This. I remember the day when I casually asked my cofounder, an amazing storyteller, how his day was. He answered: „Awesome. I had 8 slides this morning. Now I have three.“ That day, something fundamentally clicked in me. I learned that day that condensing and sharpening information towards a punchline is real, hard and meaningful work. Or, as Mark Twain once said, “I didn’t have time to write you a short letter, so…

It was Blaise Pascal in his Lettres Provinciales.

Re: Death by PowerPoint: the slide that killed seven people (2019)

#175

Post by mjevans » Wed, Mar 09, 2022, 9:39 PM UTC

bumby wrote: post #130

phicoh wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That points to a far more fundamental problem. Related to information processing higher up in the organisation. Just making better slides is unlikely to solve that problem.

Probably correct, and I have doubts that those types of problems are easily fixed because they're rooted in human psychology. It's interesting to me that the "big" incidents seem to occur every 15-20 years, almost as if there is a new professional cohort who has to learn the hard way. I do think clear communication is a necessary, but insufficient, element of fixing that problem.

This could also be related to a broader tendency to promote 'performers' who are more likely to take risks or shortcuts that they might not realize involve risks as well as people that use less resources (lower safety margins, less overlapping checks etc).

It's sadly difficult to be recognized for excellence in preventing surprises, as hard as it is to quantify that.

Re: Death by PowerPoint: the slide that killed seven people (2019)

#176

Post by potatolicious » Wed, Mar 09, 2022, 9:40 PM UTC

NikolaNovak wrote: post #81

codeflo wrote: post #29

Linked from Tufte’s article, I found this interesting comment from someone’s experience at Microsoft: [1] > Attempting to have slides serve both as projected visuals and as stand-alone handouts makes for bad visuals and bad documentation. Yet, this is a typical, acceptable approach. PowerPoint (or Keynote) is a tool for displaying visual information, information that helps you tell your story, make your case, or prov…

100%. One of the things I'm drilling into my team (we do a lot of slides!), is you have to decide - are you making slides for: 1. presentation - should be sparse, key, anchoring data that enables people to ground themselves while they listen and pay attention to YOU or 2. Reference - dashboard and background and details and density If a deck may be used for both purposes, intentionally or not (e.g. we expect it to be…

One effective way of juggling the two types of slides I've found is to stick the reference slides into an appendix that isn't part of the actual presentation - but can be quickly pulled up during ensuing discussions, and for the benefit of people reviewing the slides later.

High-level stats during the actual presentation, meaty details available upon request.

Re: Death by PowerPoint: the slide that killed seven people (2019)

#177

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Mar 09, 2022, 10:02 PM UTC

cryptonector wrote: post #152

codeflo wrote: post #29

Linked from Tufte’s article, I found this interesting comment from someone’s experience at Microsoft: [1] > Attempting to have slides serve both as projected visuals and as stand-alone handouts makes for bad visuals and bad documentation. Yet, this is a typical, acceptable approach. PowerPoint (or Keynote) is a tool for displaying visual information, information that helps you tell your story, make your case, or prov…

Most slide decks I ever see I see long after they are presented. As a result I want slide decks to stand alone -- that or else video to be published instead of slide decks. As a presenter I have to worry about whether my slides will be seen w/ or without video of my presentation. Therefore I try to make my slide decks able to stand alone, though I admit this is not great. The common pattern now instead is to make col…

[deleted]

Re: Death by PowerPoint: the slide that killed seven people (2019)

#178

Post by toyg » Wed, Mar 09, 2022, 10:05 PM UTC

PaulHoule wrote: post #145

toyg wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your boss must have been traumatized by some salesman. PPTs are great, when they have been written by someone who knows what to communicate and how to do it, which involves knowing your audience. For boffins, slides that are denser than average but lighter than what they would otherwise have to read, are just fine. For the layman, one better err on the side of simplicity and direct impact. > PowerPoint is something y…

I've been taught that if you are selling high tech products to C-levels at the biggest companies you want to have highly information dense slides (e.g. condense 2 slides into 1, then condense 2 of those slides in 1) but also have them well organized so you can make a presentation that drives home a few key points. Personally I am a big fan of powerpoint for making "boxes and lines" diagrams about how a product works,…

> at the biggest companies you want to have highly information dense slides

One of my bosses got that memo - the whole thing is one single giant slide with 12 indicators or so. Their sessions are hell, they make people roll eyes and disengage out of boredom. The message I get is that they either don't really care to interact with us hoi polloi, or are just bypassing their own inadequacy at managing a deck at speed - which is understandable, but at that point why are you even there?

IMHO, if one has 6-9 segregated boxes on the same slide and is going to describe each one, they could have been 6-9 slides with exactly the same content but bigger and more impactful. But people have grown to fear the whitespace (can't help themselves overfilling each slide) and transitions (the dreaded pause and meaningless "let's read the title" which is horribly endemic in the States), so they go for this compromise. The impatient reads the whole slide and tunes out, but is not annoyed at you for keeping him from doing that, so it's considered a win. Still, he's not listening to anything you're saying - you could have as well just sent an email.

(It might well be just a fad. C-levels love fads like your next person. In fact, they often love creating fads, just to watch the monkey dance.)

IMHO, a slide should have the elements you're linking together to make a single point. If the point is "sales are good but margin is bad", you'll need a few graphs in the same slide, for sure. But you need transitions at some point to keep people awake and focused on the train of thought you want them to ride. Even in a TED talk, where you really just want people to look at you and only you, the occasional flash of light from transitions is necessary to keep the senses engaged.

Re: Death by PowerPoint: the slide that killed seven people (2019)

#179

Post by mltony » Wed, Mar 09, 2022, 10:32 PM UTC

Could it be that Boeing engineers made this presentation vague and confusing on purpose? I mean the article presumes that the engineers had poor PowerPoint skills, but it seems to me that this could have been cover-your-ass type of situation (also perhaps similar to Challenger disaster story).

I mean obviously Boeing engineers need to communicate to NASA their assessment of the situation, but they don't want to be blamed for any technical difficulties (e.g. if second shuttle would have to be launched to save the crew). So they think Columbia will probably be fine, but let's communicate our worries to NASA, but let's do that in deliberately vague and conspicuous language, in hope that NASA managers won't see the fine print.

Re: Death by PowerPoint: the slide that killed seven people (2019)

#180

Post by manquer » Wed, Mar 09, 2022, 10:44 PM UTC

oconnor663 wrote: post #165

The title presumed that the crew could have been rescued if NASA had recognized that reentry was impossible. But that's far from clear. This article goes into fascinating detail about how difficult it would have been to prepare a rescue mission on time: https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/02/the-audacious-rescue... One huge issue, beyond whether a rescue mission would've been possible, is whether it would've be ethi…

There are billion decisions in the road of design and operation of the shuttle that all contributed in some degree or other to the tragic outcome.

This article is not attempting to answer that question, there is volume of literature on that.

The primary thrust of the article is to highlight a common tool we use and how using it ineffectively can be dangerous, it does a good job of communicating that point effectively albeit with click baity title.

I and most people here wouldn't understand tile design or shuttle engineering or ethics of space risks and not something we can learn from, it is rocket science after all,

However crappy PowerPoint presentations we all use and consume and we could potentially improve communicating in our day to day professional lives even if though we don't do cool NASA kind of projects.