After graduating, I thought the corporate world would revolve around the baseline skills I learned throughout my educational career. The baseline skills I imagined would be at the forefront of professionalism include things like reading comprehension, grammar, spelling accuracy, and other things your 6th grade teacher might underline in red pen if you used it incorrectly. However, I think the corporate workforce lacks these skills and it caters to lazy outputs.
In my opinion, reading comprehension is the most important baseline skill that is developed throughout the educational path of a child through young adulthood. It is the combination of language skills such as spelling and grammar, with the facts and opinions the language creates. With excellent reading comprehension comes critical thinking ability. The ability to process the written facts and create inferences and opinions about what was left out. In the corporate space the ability to use this effectively is almost erased completely by online tools and fractured workflows.
Online tools such as PowerPoint or Google Slides present a great example of how reading comprehension and fractured workflows prevent critical thinking. These software programs are extremely versatile. Their versatility makes it easy to take shortcuts to present information which usually leaves out key details or hides them in a flurry of numbers, figures, and labels. The goal of a PowerPoint is a presentation in which someone should be speaking to the key points and elaborating on these key details. I simply do not see this happening, most of the time people are regurgitating slide info save the few who have thoroughly impressed me.
The weakness with PowerPoint occurs when it is not used to support a well understood narrative or story. Instead, it is used as a simplified reporting mechanism that puts everything on the slide to be read. Simplified reporting often occurs when slides, or “decks” rather, are used for pitches, proposals, or internal meetings. This is lazy, no two ways around it.
Starting with internal meetings, the key question is, why can’t this be in a formal report document? An important meeting has been scheduled shouldn’t preparation be key? An 8-hour workday and a group cannot create a formal report in document format and convert it to PDF to be read. It seems as if people don’t know that word documents support pictures and figures all the same as slides do. Except in word documents, it’s clear the filler photos are useless, this isn’t a marketing campaign. The superfluous photos and images in slides should be saved for children and leave design to the design professionals that actually can create value from image. Seriously, people who can design should take offense to some of the slide decks I’ve seen (and created). Furthermore, the filler content leaves out information a 2–3-page report would not. Say a meeting is scheduled for Thursday. The report could easily be completed two days in advance for whatever topic is so important it needs a full team meeting. Therefore, every employee should read the document and prepare for the meeting. I mean most people in the corporate workforce went to college and I am 100% sure they were assigned more reading in less time for class discussion.
It’s evident why Steve Jobs said, “people who know what they’re talking about don’t need a PowerPoint.” If you read a two- or three-page report and contributed to the business, you would be able to do as I defined early. Process the facts and create inferences about what is not there. And what would that prompt? Questions and dialogue rather than a monologue from those who survived longer on the corporate ladder.
The evidence suggests the same. In college, creating written reports was almost always a more comprehensive way of showing your understanding to a professor. Also evident by the fact that a reading assignment was never to “review the deck”, they were mainly research papers, books, or other written content. AND from this you can create a presentation (in tandem to a paper) and ELABORATE on the content with your expertise to practice speaking skills. I think people lack these skills and often come unprepared and use phrases such as “lets circle back on this”. Which to me translates to “I do not know the answer, I need to go check” and unless this is an excellent question then it is a lazy response. If I said “let’s circle back to that one” in a class discussion, I would fail the assignment but if I said “I don’t know or I don’t remember” the confident transparency may indicate I truly forgot the key details, which happens to people.
Now to take on pitches and proposals. My biggest qualm is the fact that pitches and proposals often include financial figures. As one of the most important parts to a pitch or proposal, I think that financial figures should be supported in a comprehensive manner first rather than straight to the presentation view. I do not understand why such an important document cannot be created prior to a PowerPoint. Like I mentioned earlier, the presentations in university were based off of prior research and written content. Slides mix images with key facts that need to be elaborated on clearly to be effective. I mean seriously in a client meeting do we expect people to read 150 words off the slides. Imagine the scenes, “okay lets take 2 minutes of silent time to read the executive summary slide”. A report should be sent out previously with the same financial facts and figures to prepare and slides used to PRESENT what is understood. This would also make the slides much shorter and time for discussion longer where progress can be made. A 20 slide PowerPoint is really a waste of time and filler visual to take eyes off the presenter. It allows people to take shortcuts and not comprehend what is written down. It also takes away the reasoning ability away from many employees in what I call a fractured environment. Too many times I have been in a presentation, and I have a question, however internally I believe it is probably known by those who made the slides and left it out on purpose (or accident). Therefore, I do not pose the question because I had no chance to prepare and understand what was being presented through my own eyes and I take the question for later and try to find the information elsewhere. Expecting a meeting cohort or audience to formulate an opinion in real time is much harder than preparing possible questions the day before. The critical thinking is then done by very few and the rest take a presentation as gospel. I can hammer this down with evidence from friends and coworkers where directors have often asked a few people to “prepare a question for us” preemptive to the meeting. This is poor practice, if people don’t have questions we could critically think and ask why our team asked no questions.
- The presentation was understandable and brilliant therefore no questions needed.
- The teams are lazy and do not care about the meeting. Is this the type of people we want on our team? How can we improve their participation? Are we providing an environment where dialogue is encouraged?
- Was the information clear enough for people to formulate opinions before changing topics 4 times? Asking a question about slide 1 may be hard to recall if slide 15 is a different topic.
- Did we ignore important topics that matter the most our constituents?
All of these questions could be addressed and looked into, but they are usually swept under the rug because our workforce lacks the confidence and ability to reason.
I must be clear as I wrap this up. I am not Steve Jobs; I do think PowerPoint and other visual tools can be used effectively and has a place in corporate America. I simply believe it is a crutch used by many rather than a tool used to for an effective performance. The crutch therefore takes away the ability for many to reason and think about the task at hand. Employees, shareholders and clients alike are spoon fed a simple delivery and it takes away the critical thinking ability from many employees. So I close with this.
How do we know when PowerPoint is the right thing to use?
When I can fully elaborate on the bullet points, present them to the reader without re-reading the slide and show key facts and figures while knowing and citing where the data came from. I know thinking and actually working is more difficult than just showing up, but we are getting paid for goodness’ sake.
Dual Waters 