[MattGaiser]

In general, we give people too much of a pass for not bothering to read what they are supposed to (and I myself am guilty of this as it seems like it preparedness for meetings is useless as nobody else reads even on the rare occasions I do speak).

That is part of the reason Powerpoint is everywhere. You cannot assume that people have read anything before the meeting, you cannot assume they will read during the meeting, so you need to read it out loud to have a decent chance of it being received.

I am also not thrilled accepting the use of titles and formatting as a excuse to skim 100 words. It is just the refusal to read/comprehend on a smaller scale.

[brimble]

> That is part of the reason Powerpoint is everywhere. You cannot assume that people have read anything before the meeting, you cannot assume they will read during the meeting, so you need to read it out loud to have a decent chance of it being received.

I've been told—very seriously—by multiple management consultants that public and private sector executives alike won't read a damn thing unless it shows up in powerpoint format, and even then you have to walk them through point by point or they'll miss most of it. This, when the documents are coming from people they're paying tons of money specifically to tell them stuff.

The company in question (you've heard of them, if you've heard of any management consulting companies at all) quite literally had an off-shored office dedicated to producing PowerPoints decks from notes overnight, while everyone on an actual engagement was sleeping. The primary tangible output of an engagement, as I understand it, is, overwhelmingly, PowerPoint decks. It's the Final Draft of the upper-end management world—apparently, you'll be dismissed and lose face if you show up with anything else, or even send something else in an email.

[db48x]

It’s not like that everywhere. Apparently at Amazon, the first 20–30 minutes of any meeting are dedicated to reading and taking notes on a memo, then the rest of the time can be spent discussing the contents of that memo. This ensures that nobody has to sit through any presentations, and also that everyone actually has time to read an in–depth document with the information that they actually need for every single meeting that they attend.

I wouldn’t want to give up engineering, but I think that sounds like something I could put up with if someone forced me to be an executive.

[wil421]

100% believable. I know someone who is a COO of a smaller company by employee count but very high revenue. They literally pay an offshore company to produce basic bullet points overnight based on notes.

[carlmr]

As the communicator your job is to ensure that the audience gets your message. This slide is so comically bad that I wouldn't expect anyone to understand the gravity of the situation after seeing it.

If this was a presentation done in high school they would have gotten a failing grade. And I think we can expect more from university educated people.

[MattGaiser]

I get this viewpoint pragmatically as nothing is going to change, but my point is that we can expect utterly nothing from the audience and excuse their refusal to do anything beyond accept Twitter feed like input.

If someone wrote "I approved the landing as the title of the slide did not seem alarming", that person would be resoundingly rebuked. That would be an outrageous official rationale and the person would be regarded as lazy and negligent.

But that is practically what happened and what we excuse.

[Graffur]

But it's not a high school presentation done for the sake of doing a presentation. It's not an audience who will review the performance. It's giving information to _professional_ _experts_ who are _responsible_ for consuming that information.

[carlmr]

>it's not a high school presentation

I agree, we can expect more from the presenters here.

Experts are humans, experts get bored, experts can't necessarily follow your bad presentation.

Underneath it all we're smart monkeys, not robots. You can't force yourself to pay attention indefinitely. It's not in our biology.

No matter how smart you are if you hear hours of presentations in a day, you will only take home a certain maximum amount of the stuff that seemed important.

If you're a presenter, and you have something life-and-death important to say, you should repeat it, you should put it into simple words, you should use appropriate language, voice and maybe even pictures to make it clear.

[Graffur]

Experts are human but it is their responsibility to not get bored in an important presentation regardless of the presenter. That responsibility means the fault is assigned to them and not the presenter.

I agree with your last paragraph but after any bad event you could point at the presenter and say "I didn't consume the information they were providing - therefore blame them not me"

[carlmr]

I would still maintain that only because you're an expert you don't have superhuman abilities of controlling your attention/boredom.

You say we can't absolve the experts from responsibility here, but it appears you want to absolve the presenters of any kind of responsibility.

Why do these experts need superhuman focus abilities while the presenters needn't even have the presentation skills of 8th graders?

But in the end we should maybe change the format of conveying information completely, whoever is to blame here.

[giantg2]

No love for anyone questioning NASA on here. This will probably get downvoted to.

I mean, NASA is the one who called in the vendor engineers to answer questions they had. If you didn't get answers to those questions, or if the answers weren't clear enough for you, then NASA needs communicate that. You can't get the information you want if you don't ask the questions. Everyone here is blaming a slide deck (that had the information on it!) instead of asking how NASA could have ignored that information. Slide formatting is a pitiful excuse for lack of due diligence by the recipients of that briefing - the people responsible for the safety of the at-risk personnel.