Eyes Wide Open: How to Make Smart Decisions in a Confusing World. Noreena Hertz

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      The investigators believed that by using PowerPoint to present the risks associated with the suspected wing damage, the potential for disaster had been significantly understated.

      As the Columbia circled the earth, Boeing Corporation engineers scrambled to work out the likely consequences of the foam striking the thermal tiles on the Shuttle’s left wing. Tragically, when they presented their findings, their methods of presentation proved to be deeply flawed. Information was ‘lost’, priorities ‘misrepresented’, key explanations and supporting information ‘filtered out’. The ‘choice of headings, arrangement of information and size of bullets … served to highlight what management already believed’, while ‘uncertainties and assumptions that signalled danger dropped out of the information chain’.17

      In other words, the very design tools that underpin the clarity of PowerPoint had served to eclipse the real story. They had distracted its readers. They had served to tell a partial, and highly dangerous, story.

      Tufte, applying his expertise in information design, investigated these claims further, and found even more to be concerned about.

      He analysed all twenty-eight PowerPoint slides that had been used by the engineers to brief NASA officials on the wing damage and its implications during Columbia’s two-week orbit of the earth, and discovered that some were highly misleading.

      The title of a slide supposedly assessing the destructive potential of loose debris, ‘Review of Test Data Indicates Conservatism for Tile Penetration’, was, in Tufte’s words, ‘an exercise in misdirection’. What the title did not make clear was that the pre-flight simulation tests had used a piece of foam 640 times smaller than that which slammed against the Shuttle. This crucial information was buried towards the bottom of the PowerPoint slide. Nobody seemed to take any notice of it – they were too focused on the headline at the top, and did not take in the full picture.18

      Tufte found that the limited space for text on PowerPoint slides led to the use of compressed phrases, with crucial caveats squeezed into ever smaller font sizes. This created a reliance on ‘executive summaries’ or slide titles that lost the nuance of uncertainties and qualifications.

      In cases such as this, in other words, oversimplification leads to the loss of vital detail.

      Complexity, a reality of executive decision-making, is something the medium of PowerPoint dangerously disregards.

      It’s not just NASA or professors who are concerned about the potential of PowerPoint to blinker our vision.

      General James N. Mattis, who served as Commander of the United States Central Command after taking over from the subsequently disgraced General David Petraeus in 2010, has always had a way with words. He once advised his marines in Iraq to ‘Be polite. Be professional. But have a plan to kill everybody you meet.’19 Mattis’s assessment of PowerPoint was equally merciless: ‘PowerPoint makes us stupid,’ he said in 2010, at a military conference in North Carolina.

      This is a feeling corroborated by his military colleagues. Brigadier General H.R. McMaster, who banned PowerPoint when leading the successful assault on the Iraqi city of Tal Afar in 2005, said, ‘It’s dangerous, because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control.’ Indeed, so aware is the US Army of the medium’s powers of evasion that it intentionally deploys PowerPoint when briefing the media, a tactic known as ‘hypnotising chickens’.20

      Of course, this is not to say that we don’t ever need information to be summarised for us. There are times when we clearly do. But if we’re making decisions on the basis of summaries, we need to remind ourselves of the significant risk that in the process key details and subtleties may well be overlooked. Or be written in such small font size that you don’t pay attention to them.

      We must also take a moment to remind ourselves that what someone else has deemed important may not be what matters most to us, or what will really make a difference to the decision we make.

      So next time you’re looking at a PowerPoint presentation, or indeed any type of executive summary, look beyond the large font and the bold headline points. The information you actually need may be somewhat more buried. Or it may not even be on the slides at all. Do also put your presenter on the spot. If it matters, ask them to clarify and expand, and provide more information.

      If you don’t, you risk being shown only tigers, and never snakes.

      The Cult of the Measurable

      It’s not only particular forms of presentation that can blinker our vision.

      One type of information often dominates our attention – numbers. This in itself can be problematic.

      Numbers can give us critical information – if we want to know whether to put a coat on, we’ll look at the temperature outside; if we want to know how well our business is doing, we’ll need to keep an eye on revenues and expenditures; and if we want to be able to compare the past with the future, we’ll need standard measures to do so.

      But the problem is that the Cult of the Measurable means that things that can’t really be measured are sometimes given numerical values.21

      Can a wine really be 86 per cent ‘good’? That doesn’t sound right to me, but one multi-billion-dollar industry doesn’t agree. Robert Parker, probably the most famous wine critic in the world, ranks wines on a scale between fifty and one hundred. And winemakers prostrate themselves before him, praying for a rating of ninety-two or above, because such a number practically guarantees commercial success, given how influential Parker’s ratings have become with wine drinkers.22

      Yet what really is the difference between a rating of ninety-two and an eighty-six? How can we tell what that six-point difference means?

      And are someone else’s tastes necessarily going to correlate with yours? I’ve already raised the question of whether Joe from Idaho on TripAdvisor is really the best person to steer your choice as to where to go on holiday. We also need to ask ourselves whether what I mean by four stars is what you mean by four stars. Whether my Zagat score of twenty means the same as yours. As the Financial Times’s wine critic Jancis Robinson points out on the subject of Parker’s influence, ‘Make no mistake about it, wine judging is every bit as subjective as the judging of any art form.’23

       So, before you make a decision based on a number, think about what the number is capturing, and also what it is not telling you.

      Risk is another area where our attempts to assign clear measures are often bound to fail. While it’s true that there are some areas where we can meaningfully quantify risk – such as engineering, where we can come up with a number for how likely a building is to withstand an earthquake, say; or medicine, where we can estimate a patient’s chance of responding to a particular drug – this approach doesn’t work effectively in all spheres. Indeed, in our turbocharged world, in which changes happen quicker and less predictably than ever before, many of our attempts to assign probabilities to future events are likely to be pretty meaningless. As President Obama said, reflecting on the huge range of probabilities that various senior intelligence folk had proffered back in March 2011 СКАЧАТЬ