Figuring out an alternative to “death-by-PowerPoint” isn’t very hard. You could turn off the slides and just talk without them. You could send out a report in advance of the presentation or meeting, rather than cramming the entire report into the slides. You could place that report in a shared file repository, organized by subject, easily accessible.
No, envisioning ways around PowerPoint-heavy presentations isn’t hard. What’s hard is making those alternatives work. We’re so used to turning our gaze to the inevitable screen of bullet lists that it’s now impossible to imagine changing the habits of meeting participants who expect to be read to.
“We send out materials ahead of time, but no one reads them. So we’re pretty much forced to drag them through the printed word up on the screen in the meeting. Otherwise they don’t have the information,” one of my clients told me recently.
It’s a common problem. People who are constantly pressed for time figure the one thing they can move to the bottom of their to-do list is reading. After all, why spend time reading the material only to then sit through it again in the meeting? Sadly, though, this approach to knowledge transfer is perpetuating the death-by-PowerPoint problem: participants who haven’t read the information that should actually be in a document—not on a slide—simply expect to gather for the group-read and plod through text-laden slides together.
It would be interesting to calculate the expense of this approach. Total up the cost of the meeting (how many people, how many hours in the meeting, and how much they make an hour). Ten people who make $50 an hour in a three-hour session is $1500. Then there’s the 10 hours the slide preparers spent cramming the document into the PowerPoint slides, another $750. Did the session deliver $2250 worth of knowledge transfer? Would it be cheaper if people read and digested information on their own, then met to review it, rather than meeting to learn it in the first place? An interesting financial perspective.
But, for now, we leave this problem in the category of that’s-just-the-way-it-is.
If you were, however, serious about moving dull, pedestrian text out of your slides and putting this information in status reports, strategy documents, written analyses and wherever else it actually belongs, how could you get people to read them? Let’s start by giving some thought to why they don’t read them today.
Business writing is boring. That’s why people don’t read it. No one ever says, “Gee, I can hardly wait to read that project plan/stack of status reports/competitive analysis/problem report.” Never. People don’t like to read business documents simply because they’re dull and lifeless, and who wants to read that? Sanitized, boiler-plate, predictable language saturates business writing. It relies on repetitive, tried and true vocabulary, which has often been scrubbed and “approved” by management, quality teams, the legal department or HR. Operational documents, in particular, are often template-driven, which means they amount to nothing more than forms fill-out. Business writing, in other words, employs techniques and practices that are the opposite of good writing.
How did this happen? There’s one obvious angle—that “approvers” are protecting business prose from possible legal exposure. But in most industries, that doesn’t apply to many documents.
What’s really happened is that well-meaning business “communication experts,” seeking to make information easily accessible and to save readers time, decided that predictability and repeatability are essential to efficiency. The net effect, however, is just the opposite: no one is reading any of it. How efficient is that? These same well-meaning business document designers should take a lesson from writing that’s actually readable and engaging, the kind of writing people choose to read. Good writing is never predictable and repeatable.
Yeah, you’re thinking, but this isn’t a plot-rich fictional account of the lives of memorable characters. We’re talking about facts here, just boring old data. Well, if that’s what you think of strategic planning, problem-solving, competition, innovation, financial risk, on-the-job conflict, and team dysfunction—that it’s all just boring old data—then I guess you can stick with the unreadable, sanitized style business readers are, sadly, used to. But as Edward Tufte says about boring old data, “If the statistics are boring, then you’ve got the wrong numbers.”
If, by chance, you’re persuaded that better writing is possible, what can you do about it? Hire an English major? Not a bad idea. (I’m not kidding.) Or perhaps find the English majors in your midst. Many companies today have Communication Departments, teams who write the newsletter, create messages about company earnings and events, and generate press releases. However one thing Communications teams rarely do is write or edit operational documents—project plans, status reports, requirements documents, financial notes, meeting minutes, and all the other things our reluctant readers don’t read.
Perhaps they should. Instead of sending business professionals to three-day “Business Writing” classes (an impossible timeframe in which to learn to write, as anyone who’s been to these classes will attest), instead enlist writers in the operational work of the company.
Knowledge is the tool we use to create goods and services. It’s the lifeblood of projects, strategy-setting, problem-solving, and technology creation, and it’s the primary source of revenue in industry today. We should stop settling for ho-hum, inefficient methods of transferring knowledge, especially when optimizing the delivery of information just takes a little imagination and a willingness to overthrow an established practice most people don’t like anyway.
