(2019)
Some previous discussions:
The Space Shuttle Columbia disaster and the over-reliance on PowerPoint (2019)
51–60 of 185 posts
Re: The Space Shuttle Columbia disaster and the over-reliance on PowerPoint (2019)
#52I don't see how this has anything to do with PowerPoint. There wasn't clear communication; the medium was completely incidental to that. They could have been writing on a chalkboard and had a communication failure, does that mean that chalkboards should be blamed in that case?
Because the medium is not conducive to dense amount of technical information that readers are expected to use to make or understand decisions. Other similar mediums like a chalkboard were not singled out because the problem was identified with PowerPoint specifically. And it wasn't a choice of mediums all with similar problems, but slides vs papers. From the article, > “The Board views the endemic use of PowerPoint b…
Would it be better if you sent them a PDF document instead? There seems to be an assumption here that if you send the stakeholders a larger volume of information they will take the time to read it. Is that a valid assumption?
Re: The Space Shuttle Columbia disaster and the over-reliance on PowerPoint (2019)
#53As an engineer, that slide looks completely reasonable to me. Its purpose was to communicate technical info, which it did adequately. Keep in mind that the subject matter is highly technical, given that we're literally talking about the Space Shuttle, and more than a high school level of reading comprehension is heavily implied. If the NASA personnel weren't competent enough to review technical data without a pithy s…
> As an engineer, that slide looks completely reasonable to me.
Then you shouldn't be in charge of communicating highly technical subject matter to decision makers, especially if lives are at stake.
Re: The Space Shuttle Columbia disaster and the over-reliance on PowerPoint (2019)
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
"That's on them" is not acceptable for an engineer when lives are on the line. Part of your job is making people understand what they need to understand. If their lack of understanding means people die, then you need to do your job and figure out how to communicate effectively to the audience you have, not the audience you want.
There’s a famous speech someone related from their civil engineering professor, where the professor basically said, if I pass you in this class I am effectively giving you a license to kill. So some of you will not be passing.
The assumption of competency goes both ways. The NASA personnel should have been able to understand a very standard slide in their field, that any college-educated fluent English speaker would have been able to grasp.
Re: The Space Shuttle Columbia disaster and the over-reliance on PowerPoint (2019)
#55This isn't a failure of PowerPoint. I work for NASA and we still use it all the time, and I'll assure anyone that the communication errors are rife regardless of what medium we're working in. The issue is differences in the way that in-the-weeds engineers and managers interpret technical information, which is alluded to in the article but the author still focuses on the bullets and the PowerPoint, as if rewriting similar facts in a technical paper would change everything.
My own colleagues fall victim to this all the time (luckily I do not work in any capacity where someone's life is directly on the line as a result of my work.) Recently, a colleague won an award for helping managers make a decision about a mission parameter, but he was confused because they chose a parameter value he didn't like. His problem is that, like many engineers, he thought that providing the technical context he discovered that led him to his conclusion was as effective as presenting his conclusion. It never is; if you want to be heard by managers, and really understood even by your colleagues, you have to say things up front that come across as overly simple, controversial, and poorly-founded, and then you can reveal your analyses as people question you.
I've seen this over and over again, and I'm starting to think it's a personality trait. Engineers are gossiping among themselves, saying "X will never work". They get to the meeting with the managers and present "30 different analyses showing X is marginally less effective than Y and Z" instead of just throwing up a slide that says "X IS STUPID AND WE SHOULDN'T DO IT." Luckily for me, I'm not a very good engineer, so when I'm along for the ride I generally translate well into Managerese.
Re: The Space Shuttle Columbia disaster and the over-reliance on PowerPoint (2019)
#56A 2008 episode of the PBS NOVA program covers the Columbia disaster. It does not get into the focus of the article posted here, but it does well covering how poorly the situation was handled (along with other things like the broad history of the Shuttle program).
Re: The Space Shuttle Columbia disaster and the over-reliance on PowerPoint (2019)
#57As an engineer, that slide looks completely reasonable to me. Its purpose was to communicate technical info, which it did adequately. Keep in mind that the subject matter is highly technical, given that we're literally talking about the Space Shuttle, and more than a high school level of reading comprehension is heavily implied. If the NASA personnel weren't competent enough to review technical data without a pithy s…
> As an engineer, that slide looks completely reasonable to me. Then you shouldn't be in charge of communicating highly technical subject matter to decision makers, especially if lives are at stake.
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Re: The Space Shuttle Columbia disaster and the over-reliance on PowerPoint (2019)
#58I don't see how this has anything to do with PowerPoint. There wasn't clear communication; the medium was completely incidental to that. They could have been writing on a chalkboard and had a communication failure, does that mean that chalkboards should be blamed in that case?
Yeah, the choice to gloss over the point "our tests are not relevant" was a deliberate one. If it was in a paper you'd have big fancy graphs of the tests and you'd have to do your own work to compare the x axis against a mention of the actual scale in question in another paragraph. It's not as if they started with "Warning: even the 600X smaller bits we tested can damage the wing" and microsoft just kind of spontaneously grew a bunch of random stuff above the fold. It's a kind of chickenshit communication which you can do in any medium. The point they ought to be making is not dense or technical, it is so simple a child could understand.
Re: The Space Shuttle Columbia disaster and the over-reliance on PowerPoint (2019)
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
> As an engineer, that slide looks completely reasonable to me. Then you shouldn't be in charge of communicating highly technical subject matter to decision makers, especially if lives are at stake.
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Are you saying NASA decision makers graduated from India?