The PowerPoint Presidency

I have been asked to elucidate upon my summary of the State of the Union Address. I can hardly do a better job than Sisyphus Shrugged's highly amusing exigesis or David Ehrenstein's lengthy and furious one or Ted Barlow's post so short, sharp and to the very heart.

What I can add is my sense that I was listening to a PowerPoint presentation. I heard bullet points laid out in orderly fashion, with their dependant, barely descriptive paragraphs. I did not hear any sense of flow, any integration of disparate elements into a coherent policy (except for the war, which seems to have a logic applying to itself alone), or any reference to just how we will get from here to there (wherever there is; wherever here is). In short, I heard the sort of presentation I hear, and doze off during, whenever I visit a corporation's headquarters (profit or non).

I am not alone in having heard "an agenda" without accomplishment. William Saletan remarks: "Record? That isn’t a record. It’s an agenda. An agenda is the measures you enact . . . A record is what those measures are supposed to accomplish"

And at Hullaballo, Digby says: "They do not reassess their policy goals, ever, because they do not really have goals. They have an itemized agenda."

Anyone with even a passing acquaintance with corporate life in America knows how ubiquitous PowerPoint has become. I'm reliably informed that it has gained currency, if not pre-eminence, in other fields and walks of life as well. It should, therefore, come as no surprise that this Administration, the most corporate we have ever had, should be the PowerPoint Boys.

Julia Keller has written an insightful examination of PowerPoint where she questions its effects on thought itself.

" What sort of world is reflected in PowerPoint? A world stripped down to briefly summarized essences, a world snipped clean of the annoying underbrush of ambiguity and complication. But is that the world in which we want to live? And are the values prized by businesses - succinctness, directness, manipulation of symbols - also the values we want running our schools and nurturing our children? "

That rather neatly summarizes the Bush Administration and my reservations about it, though I might be less kind than "succinctness, directness".

In my work doing conflict impact analysis I am always told that any situation is very complicated, very difficult to understand. No one in my field disputes this: conflicts are complicated. However, most of the tools for analyzing conflict are simply itemized lists of circumstances that are broadly characteristic of conflicts. You run down the list, you make a checkmark next to everything that seems to be present in your context, you maybe write a paragraph about each checkmark, and you've done a conflict analysis. Staple it to your funding request and file it.

All the nuance of a particular situation, all the connections between the elements, all the history behind the present, and all the momentum toward possible futures, all of these are lost, collapsed into a series of one-size-fits-all categories. With this collapse also disappears any understanding of the link between outcomes and goals.

With a tidy set of bullet points, a clear agenda, or a shopping list I know precisely how to measure my outcomes. If I get home this evening having bought lightbulbs or having passed an education bill I can now check that item off my list. What I've overlooked is that the purpose of an education bill is so that American children will receive a better education — so I'd better fund it; or that to be able to see this evening, first I have to screw in the lightbulb. The goal, that better and brighter future for myself and for my country, is what all the outcomes are supposed to be building up toward. But simply achieving outcome after outcome does not build up to anything without a strategy that explicitly links the steps along the way to the goal.

Successful outcomes, completed on time and under budget, and measured by our own rigorous yardsticks, lead to consequences, some intended and some not. The consequences are human. They are what happen in people's lives, what people actually do and suffer. Much of the time, consequences are a part of the thinking about outcomes, but not always. George Bush has goals: economic prosperity and national security top the list. He also has an agenda. But successfully implementing his agenda point by point — the desired outcomes (pass a tax cut, go to war) — will neither ensure nor secure these goals. The agenda items are completely divorced from their human consequences because the consequences are simply left out of the equation as unquantifiable and, therefore, unanalyzeable.

(Whether they are in fact unanalyzeable is another issue. Unintended consequences are always being dismissed because "if we knew what the uninteded consequences were before hand, we'd compensate for them". That objection rather neatly shuts down all creative thought and contingency planning. In addition, by claiming that you cannot count certain things, you can avoid some messy questions. Well, until someone starts asking them anyway.)

Suggesting to someone in the Administration or to one of their Republican interpreters that they have not yet made the case for going to war with Iraq leads to intense frustration on all sides. The Republican hauls out his PowerPoint slides and goes through the presentation again. He thinks that this is making the case, that going over a Things-To-Do-Today list is an explanation. The questioner clearly isn't accepting this as any sort of analysis and wants to know how to get from one bullet point or slide to the next and, furthermore, what all of those things have to do with the larger goal of national security. You don't have to go far on the internet to find this cycle repeated ad nauseam.

The question being asked is simple: What if unintended consequences, or circumstances on the other side of the world, change the situation? The most common answer, we'll deal with that when it happens, is not encouraging and all too indicitive of PowerPoint thinking. PowerPoint does not allow questions to change the direction of the presentation, one slide after the other; it does not allow for questioning the assumptions leading from one slide to the next; it does not allow for more than one answer or more than one future. As Ms Keller says:

" [...] PowerPoint has a dark side. It squeezes ideas into a preconceived format, organizing and condensing not only your material but - inevitably, it seems - your way of thinking about and looking at that material. A complicated, nuanced issue invariably is reduced to headings and bullets. And if that doesn't stultify your thinking about the subject, it may have that effect on your audience - which is at the mercy of your presentation. "

Good PowerPoint presentations are possible, but few and far between. An artist can, no doubt, use the program to capture nuance, organize analysis, and admit complication. Unfortunately, effective PowerPoint presentations, like the State of the Union Address, are all too common, stultifying thought and having no mercy on the audience.

If you define problems with bullet points, you'll conclude that the solution is bullets.

. . .

UPDATE: Title changed at the suggestion of Mrs Martial, who recommended that I not avoid the obvious alliterative. I bow to her understanding of poetics. A few edits.

Posted by Martial