The Tool Is The Problem?

My husband recently retired from the military.  He had a long career and continues to be interested in all political issues that involve the military.  This morning, I got an interesting nudge from a friend on Facebook.  He wondered what my husband would think of this.  First, I should say that my husband is very VERY conservative.  This friend is very VERY liberal.  They are both engaging and interested in each other's viewpoints, but they are diametrically opposed on nearly every single topic.  Especially the military.

The first thing I did was read the article.  Then I wondered about the actual point of the story.

See this article is all about how military commanders are complaining about PowerPoint.  Now, my husband was in the service long enough that he remembers both briefing generals off pencils and paper, and briefing them off high tech gadgetry like laptops and PowerPoint.

The thing that the generals in this story are complaining about is the tool.  Not the message.  If you are in a brief that bores you into unconsciousness, why blame the tool by which the message is delivered and not the information itself?  I really don't understand.

What I can tell you is that high ranking military men don't want their time wasted.  They want concise, thoughtful updates and they want only the salient points.  There is nothing wrong with this desire.  It is also the subordinates who are spending the time putting together the briefing materials for those meetings.  They might complain about the time they spend on PowerPoint slides, but twenty years ago, they were spending the same amount of time using pencil and paper to make the information cogent and quick.  No one wants to waste a busy man's time.

I have a very dear friend who finds it easier to write a 35 page document than to give you 6 bullet points on the same topic.  What she has discovered is that, for her, she has to write the 35 page document so that she can back into just the 6 most important items for discussion.  This has always fascinated me.  I can start with 6 bullet points and write the 35 page document.  I outline and then expand.  But this gal works in the opposite direction.  That's the way her mind works.

When you factor in all the ways different people think, analyze and consume information, it makes the military briefings appear difficult.  But it's no different now, with today's technology, than it was 30 years ago with pencils and paper.  You still have to take a great deal of information and parse it down to just what the 'higher ups' need to know.  It's not easy, it never was.  But don't blame the tool or the format.  The real problem is aggregating a huge amount of information and trying to just pass along the most important bits.

--Sandee Wagner