Cartoon

I found this cartoon to be excellent...

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I fell out of my chair laughing when I saw this. I immediately thought of how George W. Bush loved his "Powerpoint presentations". That "tool" of simplified worldviews (and military "strategy") helped dupe the US into the disastrous Iraq war as well as into mishandling Afghanistan and who knows how many other US skirmishes and battles.

My experience is that the Powerpoint presentation substitutes for thought and intelligence and lures those with weak minds -- Bush keeps popping into my mind -- into actions that are oh so regrettable. When presented in bullet form, ideas seem so pristine and complete. The messy details, the hidden assumptions and lurking limitations don't get considered.

I'm reminded of how most wars start with high spirits, the youth are ready to march off to war, excited, worried that the battles won't last long enough and they will miss the excitement. Inevitably things go badly and the war drags on. Losses are inconceivably huge. The initial goals are lost in all the necessary "decisions" which make the conflict intractable and unending. By the end, exhaustion wears a people down. Think Europe after WWII with its widespread starvation and wrecked cities.

So when I look at all the "weapons" in the above cartoon, the most dangerous is the pointer, the innocent little Powerpoint icon to help you walk through a tidy, antiseptic, over-simplified presentation which sells a war to a president and which allows generals to sell a plan to their staff.

I worked for nearly three decades as an engineer and every project I worked on started with a nice, tidy presentation and a step-wise plan to achieve the goals. But during the years of engineering and development, I saw the day-to-day struggle that turned the simplistic initial presentation into a nightmare of dependencies and deadends, into reworking and workarounds, into delays and cost overruns. Life isn't simple. Plans are simple. And Powerpoint presentations are the simplest of the simple. For that reason, they are the most dangerous.