I used to be a powerpoint wiz, and some of my colleagues spent a large amount of time animating, dissolving, colouring and prettifying their presentations as though the quality of their powerpoint could disguise the paucity of their thought.
So it’s noteworthy that Amazon founder—and new Washington Post owner—Jeff Bezos’ proscribes PowerPoint presentations at Amazon.
Bezos instead requires that employees compose 6-page narrative memos, and he starts meetings with quiet reading periods—“study halls”—in which everyone reads the memo from beginning to end.
So the company that is devoted to helping customers do things quick-quick-quick—“1-click ordering,” same-day delivery, the instant download—creates an environment where employees take the time to write and think slowly.
If I knew that I had to write six pages—and that others will publicly read and discuss what i’d written—I’d take the time to do it as well as I could.
Composing six well-crafted pages requires a large amount of considered thought—not just the usual list of topics and disjointed points that you can animate on a powerpoint deck and bluff your way through, but the development of a considered line of argument.
When you have to write your ideas out in complete sentences and complete paragraphs, it forces a deeper clarity of thinking.
PowerPoint makes it too easy to create the illusion of a coherent argument, and it enables people to be tempted and avoid asking themselves if they really have a good sound cogent argument to make.
As a former PowerPoint employee described:
Now we’ve got highly paid people sitting there formatting slides—spending hours reformatting slides—because it’s more fun to do that than concentrate on what you’re going to say. . . . Millions of executives around the world are sitting there going, “Arial? Times Roman? Twenty-four point? Eighteen point?”
When you have to put together a 6-page memo that will be closely read, all of a sudden you’ve got more important things to think about than Arial vs. Times Roman.
The importance of the depth of thought that crafting an extended argument in Amazon’s success is a clue about why so many employers find that new college graduates aren’t well prepared to be contributors in their workplaces. A major, recent study found that half of the college students surveyed were not required to write more than 20 pages in any course in a typical semester. Writing is like any other learned skill—if you don’t practice it, you can’t do it very well. If college students don’t write much, they won’t be ready to contribute—even in the majority of workplaces where new graduates can hide fuzzy thinking in a PowerPoint presentation.
So, why not consider ditching the traditional powerpoint solution for crafting a memo, doesn’t have to be 6 pages, it can be 3, or 2, or just 1. But in avoiding the powerpoint trap- where disconnected statements arrows, diagrams and pictures mask woolley thinking; get to the heart of the problem by forcing your team members to think, and think deeply about their ideas the implications of these and even consider the possible unintended consequences of their ideas.
Time for some serious thought.