[wenc]

There are companies with heavy non-native English speaking populations, for whom it be a greater cognitive load to constrain themselves to prose, whereas they might be good at explaining things pictorially interpersed with terse text.

Sometimes distillation and condensation can lead to more precise thinking too.

Western civilization has a bias toward the written, which has helped us produce analytical thinkers ("Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man." - Francis Bacon). We tend to value precision in verbal expression and argumentation (disputation) as means of arriving at knowledge.

But I think we need to recognize that other cultures have other preferences that may be just as effective. From what I've observed, Japanese culture has a preference for the pictorial (Kanban is one such example) and it's amazing how much much they've achieved along those lines. I've worked with Japanese folks and their docs and slides tend to be diagram heavy (often beautifully so). Japanese product manuals also reflect their visual culture.

[joe_the_user]

"There are companies with heavy non-native English speaking populations, for whom it be a greater cognitive load to constrain themselves to prose, whereas they might be good at explaining things pictorially interpersed with terse text."

I don't think giving a full, narrative structured presentation beyond the capacity of a non-native speaker given effort. While certainly other communication-approaches exist in other cultures - as well as in our own, I don't think one can really say full narrative structure is Western specific.

Moreover, I'd say the intent of asking for a narrative argument is to require a significant cognitive load from anyone putting out an idea. You definitely don't get a "brainstorming" effect, where lots of idea appear at once, from requiring a full narrative description.

"Sometimes distillation and condensation can lead to more precise thinking too."

Indeed. But the principle is a well written long-form narrative consists of a sequence of precise, condensed statements and not merely blathering on.

It might seem unfair to ask non-native speaker to reach a level of long and precise utterances. But currently, American education is poor enough that writing a coherent narrative document would be quite hard for a fair portion of Americans.

[loganfrederick]

This is a really good, interesting point. You're probably right that it's deeply rooted in culture. In America, pictures and diagrams are just as often, if not more so, used to obfuscate than provide clarity. But I don't disagree with other cultures being able to teach from a young age how "a picture can be worth 1,000 words" and how to execute that meaningfully.

[SatvikBeri]

That's a really interesting point. You could argue that the problem is the low standard of PowerPoints in most companies, not the presentation medium itself. I've certainly seen the occasional great presentation.

To put it another way, my view is that

good visuals >> good writing > average writing >> average visuals

So I could certainly imagine a culture where the average visual presentation was good enough to make that the best choice.

[nostrebored]

Amazon also has a heavy non native English speaking population. Both of my team's managers and over half of my team are second language English speakers. People can still write docs.

[Aeolun]

I’ve been in Japan for 6 years now, and I have yet to be favourably impressed by any presentation I’ve seen.

Often the presentations involve dumping literally all their graphs and text on the slide, and then literally reading from the slide.

[mcqueenjordan]

Writing narratives doesn't preclude pictures, graphs, metrics, visualizations, diagrams etc. It was common to see these included inline or as an appendix in Amazon docs.

[Shorel]

From what I have seen, in the west PPT are done quick and dirty, as a way to avoid doing the hard work of writing.

But a well designed graphic can require as much work as a well written paragraph, and if the Japanese put all the care needed, then the end result will be very high quality.

The point is, it is not the nature of the media, but the mentality of the worker what guarantees results.

[hopler]

Visual presentations are fine, if they provide a thorough analysis, and not just clip art.