「太依賴PowerPoint」 讓美軍變笨？

自由時報有一篇報導,我覺得也蠻值得我們用心體會的

http://www.libertytimes.com.tw/2010/new/apr/28/today-int2.htm

「太依賴PowerPoint」 讓美軍變笨？

編譯陳成良／特譯

去年夏天，美軍駐阿富汗最高指揮官麥克里斯托在喀布爾聽取一項PowerPoint簡報，其原意是要用微軟公司這款簡報軟體闡述美國戰略複雜性，結果簡報中的圖表卻活像一碗義大利麵，讓人看得霧煞煞。據幕僚回憶，麥克里斯托將軍當時苦笑說：「等我們搞懂這張幻燈片，就可打勝仗了。」頓時引來哄堂大笑。

這張幻燈片隨後在網路上流傳，成為PowerPoint作為一種軍事工具，卻已失控的例證。一如叛亂份子，PowerPoint已悄悄走入美軍日常生活，達到近乎擺脫不掉的地步。美軍人員耗費大量時間製作PowerPoint簡報的事蹟，已在五角大廈、伊拉克及阿富汗，製造綿延不絕的笑料。

過度倚賴簡報軟體 扼殺批判性思考

不過美軍指揮官指出，這些笑話背後隱藏著嚴肅的顧慮，那就是太過倚賴這種簡報軟體的結果，會扼殺討論、批判性思考以及周延的決策，特別是它讓被戲稱為「PowerPoint遊騎兵」的菜鳥軍官每天為了製作大大小小會議的簡報，而忙得分身乏術。

美軍聯合作戰司令部司令馬提斯上將日前在北卡羅萊納州一場軍事會議中，直指PowerPoint會讓美軍「變笨」。馬提斯的演說不靠PowerPoint協助。另一位將軍麥克馬斯特准將，將PowerPoint比喻為美軍的「內憂」。他在二○○五年成功領軍掃蕩伊拉克北部城市塔拉法，當時他就嚴禁官兵用PowerPoint作簡報。麥克馬斯特後來受訪時指出，PowerPoint的危險在於它可能產生理解以及管控上的錯覺，而世界上有些問題無法用PowerPoint的功能呈現。

就麥克馬斯特的觀點，PowerPoint最嚴重攻勢不是那些像義大利麵的表格圖案，而是其中的僵化要點綱領（bullet points），以目前美軍在伊、阿的作戰情勢而言，這些用電腦做出來的綱領，並沒有把當地政治、經濟及族裔等因素環環相扣。

PowerPoint自一九八七年問世至今，已是美軍文化中根深柢固一環，要戒掉談何容易。「被PowerPoint整死」已成軍中俗諺，指的是製作一項簡報動輒就要附帶三十多張幻燈片。美軍沃特敦堡基地的陸軍作戰官柏克說：「我認為它不會很快消失。」（取材自紐約時報）

以下是紐約時報的原文
另外再加上這張有名的義大利麵簡報

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/27/world/27powerpoint.html

We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint

WASHINGTON — Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the leader of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, was shown a PowerPoint slide in Kabul last summer that was meant to portray the complexity of American military strategy, but looked more like a bowl of spaghetti.
“When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war,” General McChrystal dryly remarked, one of his advisers recalled, as the room erupted in laughter.

The slide has since bounced around the Internet as an example of a military tool that has spun out of control. Like an insurgency, PowerPoint has crept into the daily lives of military commanders and reached the level of near obsession. The amount of time expended on PowerPoint, the Microsoft presentation program of computer-generated charts, graphs and bullet points, has made it a running joke in the Pentagon and in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“PowerPoint makes us stupid,” Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander, said this month at a military conference in North Carolina. (He spoke without PowerPoint.) Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster, who banned PowerPoint presentations when he led the successful effort to secure the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar in 2005, followed up at the same conference by likening PowerPoint to an internal threat.

“It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control,” General McMaster said in a telephone interview afterward. “Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.”

In General McMaster’s view, PowerPoint’s worst offense is not a chart like the spaghetti graphic, which was first uncovered by NBC’s Richard Engel, but rigid lists of bullet points (in, say, a presentation on a conflict’s causes) that take no account of interconnected political, economic and ethnic forces. “If you divorce war from all of that, it becomes a targeting exercise,” General McMaster said.

Commanders say that behind all the PowerPoint jokes are serious concerns that the program stifles discussion, critical thinking and thoughtful decision-making. Not least, it ties up junior officers — referred to as PowerPoint Rangers — in the daily preparation of slides, be it for a Joint Staff meeting in Washington or for a platoon leader’s pre-mission combat briefing in a remote pocket of Afghanistan.

Last year when a military Web site, Company Command, asked an Army platoon leader in Iraq, Lt. Sam Nuxoll, how he spent most of his time, he responded, “Making PowerPoint slides.” When pressed, he said he was serious.

“I have to make a storyboard complete with digital pictures, diagrams and text summaries on just about anything that happens,” Lieutenant Nuxoll told the Web site. “Conduct a key leader engagement? Make a storyboard. Award a microgrant? Make a storyboard.”

Despite such tales, “death by PowerPoint,” the phrase used to described the numbing sensation that accompanies a 30-slide briefing, seems here to stay. The program, which first went on sale in 1987 and was acquired by Microsoft soon afterward, is deeply embedded in a military culture that has come to rely on PowerPoint’s hierarchical ordering of a confused world.

“There’s a lot of PowerPoint backlash, but I don’t see it going away anytime soon,” said Capt. Crispin Burke, an Army operations officer at Fort Drum, N.Y., who under the name Starbuck wrote an essay about PowerPoint on the Web site Small Wars Journal that cited Lieutenant Nuxoll’s comment.

In a daytime telephone conversation, he estimated that he spent an hour each day making PowerPoint slides. In an initial e-mail message responding to the request for an interview, he wrote, “I would be free tonight, but unfortunately, I work kind of late (sadly enough, making PPT slides).”

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates reviews printed-out PowerPoint slides at his morning staff meeting, although he insists on getting them the night before so he can read ahead and cut back the briefing time.

Gen. David H. Petraeus, who oversees the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and says that sitting through some PowerPoint briefings is “just agony,” nonetheless likes the program for the display of maps and statistics showing trends. He has also conducted more than a few PowerPoint presentations himself.

General McChrystal gets two PowerPoint briefings in Kabul per day, plus three more during the week. General Mattis, despite his dim view of the program, said a third of his briefings are by PowerPoint.

Richard C. Holbrooke, the Obama administration’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, was given PowerPoint briefings during a trip to Afghanistan last summer at each of three stops — Kandahar, Mazar-i-Sharif and Bagram Air Base. At a fourth stop, Herat, the Italian forces there not only provided Mr. Holbrooke with a PowerPoint briefing, but accompanied it with swelling orchestral music.

President Obama was shown PowerPoint slides, mostly maps and charts, in the White House Situation Room during the Afghan strategy review last fall.

Commanders say that the slides impart less information than a five-page paper can hold, and that they relieve the briefer of the need to polish writing to convey an analytic, persuasive point. Imagine lawyers presenting arguments before the Supreme Court in slides instead of legal briefs.

Captain Burke’s essay in the Small Wars Journal also cited a widely read attack on PowerPoint in Armed Forces Journal last summer by Thomas X. Hammes, a retired Marine colonel, whose title, “Dumb-Dumb Bullets,” underscored criticism of fuzzy bullet points; “accelerate the introduction of new weapons,” for instance, does not actually say who should do so.

No one is suggesting that PowerPoint is to blame for mistakes in the current wars, but the program did become notorious during the prelude to the invasion of Iraq. As recounted in the book “Fiasco” by Thomas E. Ricks (Penguin Press, 2006), Lt. Gen. David D. McKiernan, who led the allied ground forces in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, grew frustrated when he could not get Gen. Tommy R. Franks, the commander at the time of American forces in the Persian Gulf region, to issue orders that stated explicitly how he wanted the invasion conducted, and why. Instead, General Franks just passed on to General McKiernan the vague PowerPoint slides that he had already shown to Donald H. Rumsfeld, the defense secretary at the time.

Senior officers say the program does come in handy when the goal is not imparting information, as in briefings for reporters.

The news media sessions often last 25 minutes, with 5 minutes left at the end for questions from anyone still awake. Those types of PowerPoint presentations, Dr. Hammes said, are known as “hypnotizing chickens.”