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The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint (2006) [pdf]

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Re: The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint (2006) [pdf]

#51

Post by jncfhnb »

QuadmasterXLII wrote: post #23
jncfhnb wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m a McKinsey consultant and this reads as kind of crazy. Nobody is ever doing anything with 50 distinct slides. My general advice is a title that is a sentence that explains your point, then a visual that proves it and a sidebar of supporting insights so you don’t have to be an expert at reading the visual. Frankly I think it’s very effective and is very closely tied to writing guidelines. The important thing is ge…

McKinsey has a reputation for cataclysmically pointless powerpoints that trick the audience into thinking that they had a point. Could the style you are suggesting be connected to that reputation?

I can’t say I agree with that. Frankly even most of the haters will dryly concede that the only thing McKinsey is good at is making powerpoints.

In my experience the slide decks are pretty solid, with occasional exceptions. For whatever reason the folks that work in the financial industry seem obsessed with truly pointlessly large decks that reach over 100 pages.

Otherwise I think the approach is good, clear, and concise.

* page one is a summary of pretty much every major point the deck will make

* if you only read the slide titles you’ll more or less recreate the summary on page one and get the story bit by bit

* if you want to understand that argument or question it you have the evidence for it on the same page

When done correctly it’s very much like reading good doc strings and collapsing or uncollapsing the function definitions to see the implementations

It’s the difference between good comments like

> sort the data by geospatial distance to the user

And classic bad ones like

> sort function

Re: The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint (2006) [pdf]

#52

Post by com2kid »

enugu wrote: post #34

Some of Tufte's criticism of slide bullets is not specific to PowerPoint, but could be extended to software which work with nested nodes like Roam/Workflowy(software which I like). Workflowy, in fact, allows you to convert a tree of nodes into a linear presentation. Wittgenstein also wrote his classic books as numbered nodes (though not nested). Indeed, this can also be seen as a critique of structured code editors v…

I've worked on heavy PP based companies, and in companies that requires 5 minute 2 pagers.

Both are here to write (info dense) but having a proper narrative structure with the 2 pager communicates far more than the PowerPoint does. A narrative structure can also drop down to bullet points it needed.

I've seen plenty of 50 page PP decks that ended up with slides full of paragraphs, basically being the worst of all possible communication formats.

Re: The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint (2006) [pdf]

#53

Post by greentxt »

senko wrote: post #28

There's no single "style of PowerPoint". People use it for various, different, things, and if you look at a deck made for one purpose through the lens of another, it'll look atrociously bad. You can use PowerPoint (or Google Slides, etc) to make: * Make visuals for your talk (in person, or over zoom); your talk is the main thing, and the backing visuals are there to focus people on what you're saying. Those kinds of…

Yep. A "powerpoint" can be single Edward Tufte graph presented to a room for 30 seconds. Or it could be War and Peace pasted across 10,000 slides. There is no one thing to complain about. Reading this lowered my opinion of tufte, who I have always found great, but also very overrated.

Re: The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint (2006) [pdf]

#54

Post by greentxt »

kqr wrote: post #18
jncfhnb wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m a McKinsey consultant and this reads as kind of crazy. Nobody is ever doing anything with 50 distinct slides. My general advice is a title that is a sentence that explains your point, then a visual that proves it and a sidebar of supporting insights so you don’t have to be an expert at reading the visual. Frankly I think it’s very effective and is very closely tied to writing guidelines. The important thing is ge…

This is the very thing TFA is against. It reduces complex arguments into one-sentence theses, one after another, luring the listener into compliance.

Yes, he should have titled it "the cognitive style of mckinsey consultants" rather than blame the software.

Re: The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint (2006) [pdf]

#55

Post by TeamDman »

Angostura wrote: post #43
nativeit wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What has a higher information density than text? Almost everything else: images, graphs, sound, video Pictures are pretty famously “worth 1000 words,” after all.

Now draw a picture that conveys everything just said in 24 words.

It took much more than 24 words to achieve the final result, and also had to use emojis to convey what I wanted lol

Even still I couldn't quite get the result I wanted

Image link

https://chatgpt.com/share/67769bef-537c-800f-90ac-35a44747f0...

Re: The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint (2006) [pdf]

#56

Post by apwheele »

zero_k wrote: post #49

This is by Edward Tufte. If you haven't had the chance to check out Edward Tufte's other works, in particular, the Visual Display of Quantitative Information [1] then I highly suggest you do. Every time I see a horrible graphic in a research paper, I redirect authors to [1]. It ought to be a must-read for anyone wanting to create a graph. Seriously, if you intend to display information, read that book. It'll open you…

I feel the same way, and a good follow up book about more general communication is Trees, maps and theorems by Doumont, https://andrewpwheeler.com/2016/12/05/review-of-trees-maps-a...

That said, I think it is possible my refusal to do cheeky ppt slides with smart art and fill them with graphs of real data instead has stunted my career growth into management.

Re: The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint (2006) [pdf]

#57

Post by Too »

senko wrote: post #28

There's no single "style of PowerPoint". People use it for various, different, things, and if you look at a deck made for one purpose through the lens of another, it'll look atrociously bad. You can use PowerPoint (or Google Slides, etc) to make: * Make visuals for your talk (in person, or over zoom); your talk is the main thing, and the backing visuals are there to focus people on what you're saying. Those kinds of…

A lot of the criticism from OP is assuming that the slides exists in a vacuum and that the slides are the presentation. Short bullets? Yeah? It's just a reminder of what was presented in the main talk. They are not supposed to contain the complete content. Now unfortunately, a lot of presenters do the same mistake, get nervous, forget what they were supposed to say and let the nerfed bullets do the talking. Worst style is when they know beforehand that this will happen and add more and longer bullets to compensate for it. Death by powerpoint, guaranteed.

That's not to say bullets are great, the 6 level columbia slide is absolutely horrendous and bullets should not be the first tool one reaches for, contrary to what powerpoint easily invites for. Prefer a good graphical visualization of the raw data and annotate it with insights to back up your main argument, then let your slides back up your talk instead of being driven by them.

There is also the argument that slide decks tend to outlive their verbal presentations, because we are too lazy to create both a slidedeck and a properly written paper. Resulting in confusing low density bullet-lists being shared around. Here, a information dense presentation help, but it's usually not enough and often forces compromises to the main presentation.

Re: The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint (2006) [pdf]

#58

Post by datadrivenangel »

conductr wrote: post #19
ipython wrote: post #11

Possibly unpopular opinion: PowerPoint is just a tool, and most people not only suck at making slides but are poor storytellers to boot. If you are a good storyteller and can effectively use the medium (as in, not just dump a bunch of bullets on a slide), you can actually convey a lot of information in a combined slide + narrative format.

Also probably unpopular opinion: most people, in business anyways, don't use or even expect powerpoint to be aiding a typical "presentation". I think we conflate powerpoints in meetings as "presentations" just like a Ted Talk is a "presentation". In business, these types of presentations do take place but are hardly a tip of the iceberg in terms of all the powerpoints being made. Under the surface, the lion's share o…

And most power points in businesses are actually documents, or worse, dual-purpose artifacts that need to be used as both the presentation materials and an artifact, and fail at both.

Re: The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint (2006) [pdf]

#59

Post by PaulHoule »

jncfhnb wrote: post #51
QuadmasterXLII wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

McKinsey has a reputation for cataclysmically pointless powerpoints that trick the audience into thinking that they had a point. Could the style you are suggesting be connected to that reputation?

I can’t say I agree with that. Frankly even most of the haters will dryly concede that the only thing McKinsey is good at is making powerpoints. In my experience the slide decks are pretty solid, with occasional exceptions. For whatever reason the folks that work in the financial industry seem obsessed with truly pointlessly large decks that reach over 100 pages. Otherwise I think the approach is good, clear, and con…

My partner and I were primarily targeting finance at that time.

I didn't always present 100% of the "big and dense" slide decks; we could get people into a dialogue early on that would give us an idea of what to show next, a bit like a "choose your own adventure" book.

(Overall our approach was super effective at getting people to talk about their business, my partner got me to read https://www.amazon.com/Secrets-Question-Based-Selling-Powerf...; We were always finding out about stuff we weren't supposed to know like the desktop virtualization program at a famously secretive hedge fund, the closely guarded data cleanup pipeline for a real estate data vendor, the time a four letter defense contractor was grasping at straws on a project for a three letter agency, ...)

Here's an example of a slide deck I would present to a general audience, in this case a local startup accelerator

https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/chatbots-in-2017-ithaca...

which is not as information dense as one of my sales slides but when I give talks like that they always want me back. (Funny that one felt obsolete by the end of 2017 but I packed in enough neural network stuff that it seems a little prescient now... Like that time I gave a talk at the first thorium energy conference about the computational physics program that would lead to a reactor that was mostly standard stuff out of intro level textbooks but useful and correct if you want to down that path. I took the schedule of reactor development when the project was abandoned in the 1970s and shifted it up to the present. The crowd reacted viscerally that it would take that long to which my answer is "you've got to get started now"; I wound up with a test reactor circa 2025 and sure enough they are building one in China.)

Re: The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint (2006) [pdf]

#60

Post by greentxt »

apwheele wrote: post #56
zero_k wrote: post #49

This is by Edward Tufte. If you haven't had the chance to check out Edward Tufte's other works, in particular, the Visual Display of Quantitative Information [1] then I highly suggest you do. Every time I see a horrible graphic in a research paper, I redirect authors to [1]. It ought to be a must-read for anyone wanting to create a graph. Seriously, if you intend to display information, read that book. It'll open you…

I feel the same way, and a good follow up book about more general communication is Trees, maps and theorems by Doumont, https://andrewpwheeler.com/2016/12/05/review-of-trees-maps-a... That said, I think it is possible my refusal to do cheeky ppt slides with smart art and fill them with graphs of real data instead has stunted my career growth into management.

One problem with both of these takes on powerpoint is they assume it will be presented in person. That's less often the case now. People present more often via teams or zoom and so a lot of the ideas (don't expect people to read and listen simultaneously) are not accurate anymore (half your viewers are audio only, more people get copies of the slides than make the original presentation). Remote vs in person are totally different beasts.
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