Don’t let your message be lost amongst mountains of text.

In most organizations, powerpoint has become the de facto presentation tool. When asked to run a meeting, we instantly open powerpoint to create a presentation. This may come as a surprise, but how often do we pause and ask the question – Is powerpoint the best way to show the data, to convey our message?

This is a story of how over-reliance on powerpoint presentations has taken lives.

From Wikipedia:

On February 1, 2003, the Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated upon reentering Earth’s atmosphere, killing all seven crew members. The disaster was the second fatal accident in the Space Shuttle program, after Challenger, which broke apart and killed the seven-member crew 73 seconds after liftoff in 1986.

During the launch of STS-107, Columbia’s 28th mission, a piece of foam insulation broke off from the Space Shuttle external tank and struck the left wing of the orbiter. A few previous shuttle launches had seen damage ranging from minor to nearly catastrophic from foam shedding, but some engineers suspected that the damage to Columbia was more serious. NASA managers limited the investigation, reasoning that the crew could not have fixed the problem if it had been confirmed. When Columbia re-entered the atmosphere of Earth, the damage allowed hot atmospheric gases to penetrate the heat shield and destroy the internal wing structure, which caused the spacecraft to become unstable and break apart.

Wikipedia

From mcdreeamiemusings.com:

NASA officials sat down with Boeing Corporation engineers who took them through three reports; a total of 28 slides. The salient point was whilst there was data showing that the tiles on the shuttle wing could tolerate being hit by the foam this was based on test conditions using foam more than 600 times smaller than that that had struck Columbia.

NASA managers listened to the engineers and their PowerPoint. The engineers felt they had communicated the potential risks. NASA felt the engineers didn’t know what would happen but that all data pointed to there not being enough damage to put the lives of the crew in danger. They rejected the other options and pushed ahead with Columbia re-entering Earth’s atmosphere as normal.

mcdreeamiemusings.com : Death by PowerPoint: the slide that killed seven people

From the Columbia Accident Investigation Report:

As information gets passed up an organization hierarchy, from people who do analysis to mid-level managers to high-level leadership, key explanations and supporting information is filtered out. In this context, it is easy to understand how a senior manager might read this PowerPoint slide and not realize that it addresses a life-threatening situation.
At many points during its investigation, the Board was surprised to receive similar presentation slides from NASA officials in place of technical reports.

The Board views the endemic use of PowerPoint briefing slides instead of technical papers as an illustration of the problematic methods of technical communication at NASA.

[Page 191] : Report of Columbia Accident Investigation Board, Volume I

Most of the decisions we make in our workplaces may not involve life and death scenarios. But let this be a reminder for us to not let our message be lost amongst the text.