[bigstrat2003]

I 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?

[stinkbeetle]

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 briefing slides instead of technical papers as an illustration of the problematic methods of technical communication at NASA.”

[andrewflnr]

But the problem, if anything, was that too much dense information was conveyed at all. Based on the analysis in the post, of the engineers had replaced that slide with one that said "Don't go forward with reentry", that might have saved lives better than any change in medium. To be clear, I'm in favor of abolishing PowerPoint for any non-ephemeral use, but the problem here was focus and framing of the info.

[xp84]

I agree completely. My deck would have been:

Slide 1: 48-point font

  Don't go forward with reentry

Slide 2: 24-point font

  * Our foam collision dataset from experimentation only included pieces below X cu in.

  * Evidence points to this piece being at least Y cu in - 200 times more massive

  * Catastrophic damage to the wing cannot be ruled out

This would have been a great PowerPoint, and I'm not convinced handing them only an academic paper with dozens of pages of facts and figures would have had the effect that my above deck would have had.

[notahacker]

Yeah, a slide like that would have been fine; fundamentally the slide is exactly like an academic paper in that some of the most interesting implications are just banal statements of the numbers in the data and qualifiers. In fact, the slide is much better than the academic paper... it doesn't contain much in the way of irrelevant data and qualifiers.

In practice Tufte and bloggers and commenters are retconning messages engineers not possessing foreknowledge of what was going to happen didn't wish to convey. The slide isn't supposed to say "no reentry" not because engineers don't know how to say no using PowerPoint, but because what the engineers are actually saying by selecting those points for consideration is "damage is theoretically possible but not in our simulations which test data suggests are actually on the conservative side; the test data is only at a very small scale though". If they'd dumbed it down, the slide would have said "it could go wrong but the limited data we've got suggests it won't"

[xp84]

I'm basically with you and let's be clear, I know nothing about the domain. But the word "limited" is doing a lot of work in that last sentence. Maybe a diagram showing relative size of the biggest foam chunk they'd tested vs. the size of the actual one would have been useful.

[andrewflnr]

Agree. Though to be honest I still think a paper with an executive summary that said "Don't go forward etc" would have probably been even better. Then the powerpoint slides can be illustrations of how far outside the testing data this is, simulations of possible damage, and other, you know, useful stuff.

[cxr]

> Based on the analysis in the post

The analysis in the post is dogshit and misrepresents the review board's actual conclusions.

> But the problem, if anything, was that too much dense information was conveyed at all

That's totally opposite to what the members of the review board identified as the problem.

[stinkbeetle]

The person I was replying to said they had no idea how it had anything to do with PowerPoint. The article quotes the report as identifying over-use of it as one of the problems that contributed to the communication break down.

I'm not making the argument and I'm not interested in engaging with this quibbling, I'm just explaining how the article said the expert who conducted the investigation found a problem with their use of PowerPoint. If you have a problem with that conclusion, then take it up with the investigation report, not me. I would be fascinated to see you provide a rebuttal of it.

[throwaway173738]

The engineer in question was probably trained by the organization to leave decision-making to management. In organizations like that you refrain from statements that sound like decisions.

Saying “more testing must be done before deciding to re-enter” would be equally valid.

[breadwinner]

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?

[mhh__]

Memos and reports also ask the author to try to explain things clearly and at length, a PowerPoint, even a technical one is usually figures and bullet points

Jeff bezos iirc speaks at length about this.

[stinkbeetle]

Are you asking me what I (a layperson having no knowledge of the organizations or projects) think, or are you asking me to look up the recommendations in the report that found over use of PowerPoint to have contributed to the communication problems at NASA for you?

[bitwize]

Feynman communicated the problem with the Challenger disaster using a rubber band and a glass of ice water.

I don't think PowerPoint is the problem in and of itself, but rather its use as a crutch to compensate for poor communication. Of course, even among scientists, few can count themselves at Feynman's level in terms of communication skills. Maybe this is a skill that NASA scientists need to brush up on, perhaps with Pluralsight courses or something? lol

[somat]

Speaking of chalkboards, next time you have to give a presentation, bring a chalkboard and do your slides in realtime. Something about the visual show, auditory overload, and not least the novelty of the act makes it much more impactful and memorial than "another powerpoint that puts you to sleep"

White boards are... ok... better than powerpoint but still fail to sell it like a chalkboard does. I think it is the noise.

[bluenose69]

Yes, the noise (which I'd call "the sound") is a big factor.

I teach in a classroom that had blackboard that had stood the test of time for decades. When it was replaced with a whiteboard, things went downhill. The markers dry out quickly, without much notice, so that students often have trouble reading the material. And the whiteboards get harder to erase year after year.

I guess the advantage of whiteboards is that a variety of colours can be used. But some students have deficiencies of colour recognition, so that's not really helpful. (I never used coloured chalk, for the same reason. Maximal contrast is the key.)

And the noise. That click drag click of chalk. Students after the transition to whiteboards told me that they really missed that. It enlivened the lectures. And when students were writing down notes, they knew to look up when they heard the sound.

Back to the point about the "visual show" and doing slides in real time. Yes, yes, yes. Once in a while I need to show something on the projector. The moment I turn it one, I see students start to disengage.

[LorenPechtel]

Definitely on the people with color issues. I have some red-green issues, for most purposes it makes me horrible at choosing colors and horrible at choices involving subtle colors (picking the good produce) but rarely interferes otherwise. But a thin line of color is another matter. I generally can't tell the difference between a 1-pixel wide line of FF0000 vs 00FF00. Nor can I tell the difference of a few-pixel-wide indicator. I can't crimp Ethernet because the fine line of the coloring of the wires reduces it to not much better than a guess.

And a whiteboard from across the room is likely to be thin enough lines to give me big problems.

[lupusreal]

The medium is the message.

PowerPoint gets used because it requires less effort from the audience. They sit back and zone out like couch potatoes. Scrap the PowerPoint and throw the technical report at the managers. Any of them who complain or otherwise don't read it are incompetent and should be fired on the spot.

[jackdeansmith]

I think it's a lot harder to have this particular type of communications failure if you're writing on a chalkboard. Imagine trying to write out that whole slide, it would take forever. If you really did have to present that information on a chalkboard, you'd be significantly more likely to write something along the lines of:

"We checked the test data: possible to damage tiles significantly" "Foam that hit wing was way bigger than the tests"

Obviously you can miscommunicate via any medium, but I think the author's point here (which I agree with) is some mediums lend themselves to specific types of miscommunication.

[recursivecaveat]

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.

[mhh__]

the medium is the message