Putting the joy in Joy’s Law - Todd Park on collaboration

Joy’s Law of management says that:

“No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else.”

Last weekend I was growing despondent over the deluge of partisan political rhetoric generated by the Presidential election process. Then I got cheered up when I heard part of an hour-long radio broadcast of an appearance at the Commonwealth Club that you can either listen to as a podcast or watch as a YouTube video.

Todd Park, who currently is the U.S. Chief Technology Officer (CTO), and had previously been CTO at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), discussed using open data and collaboration to improve health care via the Health Data Initiative. 

Here is a wonderful eight-minute TedMed speech that highlights what’s been going on:





There’s an article from the Feb 19, 2012 Radiology Business Journal with background on this:

“The government, for many years, has made weather data collected by NOAA’s National Weather Service openly available and machine readable, downloadable by anybody for free, without intellectual-property constraint. That has powered a whole host of innovations in the private sector: weather newscasts, weather news sites, weather mobile apps, and other services that have created huge value for the people of the United States.

The government did something similar in the 1980s, when it liberated GPS data, which now fuel everything from foursquare™ to your iPhone to supertanker navigation systems and everything in between. Health Data Initiative is running the same open-data and open-innovation play, but this time, with health-related and health-care–related information that’s been sitting in the vaults of the DHHS and sister agencies.....
 
There’s a famous law we like to quote that’s really an underlying principle behind the Health Data Initiative. It’s called Joy’s Law, attributed to William (Bill) Joy, the cofounder of Sun Microsystems. He is believed to have said that no matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else.
 
Our corollary to that law is that if you want to maximize national social return on DHHS data, don’t just have the smart DHHS people turn the data into tools that can help people. Have all the other smart people in the world—who vastly outnumber us—access and use the data and turn them into tools that can help people.”

The cartoon physicians were borrowed from here.

Is 540 million minutes per day a large number or a small number?

Every day Americans reportedly waste 540 million minutes looking for lost or misplaced items. That sounds like it’s a large number, but what’s in it for me? What is my share of it?

According to the 2010 Census the U.S. population was 308,745,538 people. When we divide 540 million by that, the result is just 1.75 minutes per day per person. I probably spend more than two minutes a day washing my hands, or waiting at traffic lights, so it’s really a relatively small number. (Last August I blogged on How to make a large number incomprehensible - or comprehensible).

That apparently large number turned up on September 3rd in a post by Jeff Davidson in his Interruption Management blog titled Taking on Too Much Leads to Waste. (He stated it as nine million hours per day). It’s a silly factoid that goes back at least to 2000, where it was stated beginning with another alleged detail as:

“According to the American Demographic Society, Americans waste more than nine million hours each day looking for lost and misplaced articles.”

I checked the current Encyclopedia of Associations in the database collection at the Boise Public Library, and couldn’t find that organization. Also, I couldn’t find them in magazine or newspaper databases, or online on Google.

Following that factoid Jeff cited another claiming:

“The average adult spends 16 hours a year searching for lost keys.”

That’s 960 minutes per year, or just 2.63 minutes per day. Again, its not really a huge fraction of the day. But keys are one type of lost or misplaced item. So, why would I be spending more time looking just for them than for everything I’ve lost or misplaced? Those two factoids contradict each other.

There’s another factoid from an August 4, 1992 Wall Street Journal article  that originally said:

“Executives waste nearly six weeks a year looking for misplaced items, according to a poll of 200 large-company execs for Accountemps, a temporary-help firm.”

On page 67 in the second edition (2004) of her book Organizing from the Inside Out, Julie Morgenstern reworded it as:

“The Wall Street Journal reported that the average U.S. executive wastes six weeks per year searching for missing information in messy desks. (That translates to just one hour per day!)”

Similar claims continue to appear on web pages about organizing like this one and this one.

How many minutes per year is that? 6 times 7 times 24 times 60, or 60,480 minutes. When we divide that by 365.25, we get 165 minutes per day, or 2-/3/4 hours (and not just one hour like Julie had claimed). Or, if we assume 250 business days per year, it would be 242 minutes per business day, or just over four hours.

It sure is a lot bigger than the 1.75 or 2.63 minutes I previously discussed. I don’t believe for a minute that any organization really would keep an executive that wasted that much time though.

If you want your audience to understand statistics, then please use consistent units they can understand - such as minutes per day (per person). Check to see if those numbers make good sense.

Some unhelpful cartoon advice if you are scared of public speaking

Yesterday, September 20, 2012, Michael Kupperman posted a lurid (but hilarious) four-panel Helpful Advice cartoon at Huffington Post. It contains three very dubious suggestions, including the Nicholas Cage method, which is to:

“Contort your brow until your eyes lose focus! You can’t be scared of an audience you can’t see!” 

The Speak-No-Evil monkey image was extracted from the Three Wise Monkeys.

Poverty was the greatest fear in Glamour magazine’s 2012 Guy Survey

In January 2012 Glamour magazine surveyed 1000 men. One of the many questions they asked was:

“What would you say was your greatest fear?”

Answers are shown above in a bar chart. (Click for a larger clearer version). Poverty (36%) came first, followed by death (23%), a tie between failing at work and never finding love (13%), speaking in public (10%), and commitment (5%). Public speaking came fifth. Over twice as many guys feared death as feared public speaking, which contradicts the constantly repeated cliche derived from the 1977 Book of Lists.

Another question they asked was:

“What do you think about most in a single day?”

Answers are shown above in another bar chart. Sex (38%) came first, followed by money (31%), work (14%), my appearance (8%), food (5%) and my sports team (4%). Most of their other survey questions were about sex & love (which are the subtitle for that magazine).

Their 2011 Guy Survey only had one fears question about Which scares you more? Two choices were the threat of tsunamis, tornadoes, or terrorism (61%) or the threat of going bald (39%).

Public speaking came first in a 1987 fear survey by Dental Health Advisor magazine

In the past month or so I have been digging up some more obscure surveys on what people fear. One came from the Spring 1987 issue of a magazine called Dental Health Advisor. I couldn’t get back to the original article, but on a newspaper database I found the data reported in an article titled Opinion Digest that had appeared on page 2 in the April 3, 1987 issue of the Miami Herald. On Google Books I found the same data reported on page 24 of the April 27, 1987 issue of Jet magazine. Finally, I found a table and a bar chart of that data on pages xi and 3 of a book by Stanley F. Malamed, titled Sedation: A Clinical Guide to Patient Management, 5th edition, 2010 over at Scribd.com.

The bar chart shown above presents all the data (Click on it to see a larger, clearer version). 27% feared public speaking, 21% feared going to the dentist, 20% feared heights, 12% feared mice, 9% feared flying, and the remaining 11% had other or no fears. 

Snakes came first in a 1988 Roper survey of what American adults were afraid of or bothered by

In the past month I’ve been looking around for more surveys about what people fear. In a May 29, 1989 New York Times article about how Meek and Mumblers Learn Ways of Getting a Word In Alison Leigh Cowan mentioned that:

“A national survey by The Roper Organization in 1988 showed 26 percent of adult Americans said they feared public speaking, second on the list of fears presented only to the 41 percent who admitted a fear of snakes. Add the 35 percent who said they were slightly bothered by public speaking and well over half the population would probably need encouragement to take the podium. The poll, which included 1,982 interviews, had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points.”

Further Google search led me to an Acrobat .pdf file of a long paper by R. A. Mittermeier, J. L. Carr, I. R. Swingland, T. B. Werner, and R. B. Mast, titled Conservation of amphibians and Reptiles, in K. Adler (ed.) Herpetology - Current Research on the Biology of Amphibians and Reptiles (Proceedings of the First World Congress of Herpetology), Society for the Study of Amphibians and Reptiles, Oxford Ohio, 1992, pages 59 to 80. Table 3 lists results from Roper Reports 88-3, which was titled Phobias: snakes mice, spiders - and public speaking.

A bar chart shows the rankings for what people were afraid of or bothered by. (Click on it to see a larger, clearer version). Snakes were first at 65%, followed by public speaking at 61%, heights at 45%, mice at 37%, and spiders and insects at 36%. There also had been a 1977 survey that didn’t ask about public speaking with snakes at 69%, heights at 45%, mice at 36%, and spiders and insects at 37%. This  1988 survey had different rankings than a 1996 Roper survey, in which fear of public speaking came first.

I’ve seen caution or warning signs about snakes being present in an area. But, I’d never seen one like the public speaking sign shown above - which I made up starting from a blank Danger Sign.

Luposlipaphobia is as useful a word as glossophobia

What is it? Luposlipaphobia was defined by Gary Larson as:

“The fear of being pursued by timber wolves around a kitchen table while wearing socks on a newly waxed floor.”

That definition was the caption for one of his The Far Side cartoons. You can find it here or here. In Wikipedia luposlipaphobia shows up on their List of Phobias under the heading of jocular and fictional phobias.  

Glossophobia is a pseudo-technical term for public speaking anxiety. It might as well refer to the fear of lip gloss or waxing your car. Nevertheless it keeps showing up in the titles of blog posts like this one. Sometimes it’s even misspelled as glossaphobia. Just like the word atelophobia, using it as a search term will send you down blind alleys. 

Review of The Art of Public Speaking: Lessons from the Greatest Speeches in History

The Art of Public Speaking: Lessons from the Greatest Speeches in History is a series of twelve half-hour lectures by Professor John R. Hale (Director of Liberal Studies at the University of Louisville) It is packaged as a set of two DVDs with a 45 page booklet.

Dr. Hale is an archaeologist, not a communications professor. Among other things he’s written a Scientific American magazine article on viking longships, and a book, Lords of the Sea: The Epic Story of the Athenian Navy and the Birth of Democracy.

Titles for those dozen lectures are:

1. Overcome Obstacles - Demosthenes of Athens
2. Practice Your Delivery - Patrick Henry
3. Be Yourself - Elizabeth I to Her Army
4. Find Your Humorous Voice - Will Rogers
5. Make It a Story - Marie Curie on Radium
6. Use the Power of Threes - Paul to His People
7. Build a Logical Case - Susan B. Anthony
8. Paint Pictures in Words - Tecumseh on Unity
9. Focus on Your Audience - Gandhi on Trial
10. Share a Vision - Martin Luther King’s Dream
11. Change Minds and Hearts - Mark Antony
12. Call for Positive Action - Lincoln at Gettysburg

In Lecture 5, Make It a Story, Dr. Hale wisely comments:

“Now, I’ve always felt that something that is relegated to a minor part of most textbooks on public speaking and rhetoric is the most important thing: storytelling.”

His main subject is Marie Curie’s 1921 speech at the Vassar College graduation. (Marie shared the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics with her husband Pierre and Henri Becquerel, and then also won the 1911 Nobel Prize in Chemistry). Dr. Hale includes her statement that:

“When radium was discovered, no one knew that it would prove useful in hospitals. The work was one of pure science, which must be done for itself, for the beauty of science.”

In Lecture 5 he also discusses two other stories in some detail. One is the story of how Odysseus returned to Ithaca disguised as a beggar (from Homer’s Odyssey). The other is the Parable of the Good Samaritan (from the Book of Luke in the New Testament).  

The set is sold as item #2031 from The Great Courses series. It has a list price of $199.95, but currently it is being sold at Amazon for $40 to $100. I enjoyed watching these lectures. I borrowed them for free from the Boise Public Library. If I’d have paid $50 instead, I would not have been disappointed.

The painting of Demosthenes of Athens practicing his oratory is from Wikimedia Commons.

Disasters and triage

When more than one thing goes wrong, it’s easy to be overwhelmed. It can be hard to keep calm, sort out what’s most important, and see what needs to be tackled first.  Sometimes you just can’t do everything. How do emergency responders learn to handle these situations? They practice using simulations - disaster exercises.

Back during my early teen years in Pittsburgh, I was in a Boy Scout troop that was part of one of the Prep Pitt exercises. At the Civic Arena I got made up with a realistic looking broken arm. They used modeling clay, chicken bones, and fake blood.  Apparently I had two broken bone ends poking through the skin. An ambulance took me over to Children’s Hospital, where I was bandaged and set aside so my “fracture” could be set later.

A decade later I was being trained as a medic by the Air Force. Everyone in the medical corp began tech school by taking a three week course called Medical Fundamentals that covered medical terminology, anatomy, physiology, first aid, etc.. It ended with a field program. Teams practiced carrying litters over an obstacle course. We learned about terminal ballistics (gunshot wounds). They taught us about triage -  a process for sorting patients into four categories:

The injured who can be helped by IMMEDIATE transport
The injured whose transport can be DELAYED
Those with MINOR injuries, who need help less urgently
The EXPECTANT who are beyond help 

Then they split us into medics and made-up patients for a realistic disaster exercise held at dusk. We ran through drizzle to find an airplane crash scene with a fuselage lit only by burning jet fuel in rows of split oil drums. Patients had been coached to scream and moan. Our only supplies were a jeep trailer with bandages, etc. We tried get the casualties sorted, treated, and away from the fuselage.  

I remember that one man with minimal injuries had been coached to wander around and realistically pester the medics. Three of the biggest medics were deputized to put him out of circulation. They grabbed some straps and a litter, and fastened him to the trunk of the largest tree in the vicinity. Problem solved.

After ten minutes or so our instructors declared that the fuel tanks on the plane had exploded, and everyone within a hundred feet was dead. By then we’d already sorted and removed almost all the patients from harm’s way.

Three years later I was working as a medic at an Air Force Reserve weekend at Greater Pittsburgh International Airport. On Sunday afternoon the crash phone rang. We loaded up our ambulance and joined the fire department and Air National Guard on the edge of the runway. Then we waited for an Air National Guard tanker aircraft to make an emergency landing on a wet runway with two of four engines shut down. They didn’t crash, but we were prepared for it.

Those four triage categories are still used in a common system known as Simple Triage and Rapid Treatment (START). The obscure military usage of the word Expectant was replaced with the word Deceased.

Last week I was listening to Nanci Griffith’s latest CD. The next to the last song is Davey’s Last Picture, which is about New York City firefighter David Halderman, Jr., who was killed at the World Trade Center on September 11th, 2001.

The image of an ambulance came from Wikimedia Commons.

Top 50 most common embarrassments for Brits

On September 7th Ladbrokes plc, one of the world’s leading betting and gaming enterprises, released the results from a survey of 2,000 people. They claimed the average person in Great Britain embarrasses himself four times a day. Forgetting people’s names was first, followed by tripping. Other results included that:

“A fifth of respondents have a public speaking nightmare that they’d rather forget – the biggest speaking blunder was having your voice break or squeak high-pitched unexpectedly.
 
The biggest embarrassments were most likely to have been work related for the majority of people, while stories involving things going wrong in front of the in-laws were also very common.
 
One in seven Brits says a relationship ended largely because something embarrassing happened.”
 
Number 50 on the list was having your towel stolen or taken while showering, and this was the subject for a 30-second television commercial with former footballer Chris Kamara.

The Top Fifty most common embarrassments were:

1. Forgetting someone’s name when introducing them

2. Tripping over in public

3. Getting someone’s name wrong

4. Getting food stains/splashes on your top

5. Waving at someone and they don’t see you

6. Getting food stuck in your teeth

7. Thinking someone’s waving at you when they aren’t

8. Being late

9. Forgetting where you parked

10. Burping accidentally


11. Getting lost

12. Having sweat patches

13. Snorting while laughing

14. Flies/ trouser zip being undone

15. Swallowing food the wrong way

16. Talking about someone not knowing they’re in earshot

17. Accidentally texting the wrong person

18. Dropping things in shop/supermarket

19. Someone trying to get in bathroom when you’re using it

20. Stalling your car at traffic lights


21. Running for public transport and it pulling away

22. Being honked at by a car

23. Making an error on the self-checkout

24. Treading in dog muck

25. Wearing odd socks

26. Being ID’d

27. Having bits of food on your face

28. Locking yourself out of the house

29. Getting stuck in clothing while trying it on

30. Getting too drunk at a wedding


31. Forgetting important documents

32. Having lipstick on your teeth

33. Dropping a drink in a pub

34. Treading on someone else’s shoes

35. Accidentally ‘liking’ someone’s Facebook picture you fancy/shouldn’t have looked at

36. Snoring on train

37. Putting clothes on inside out/upside down

38. Walking into lamppost

39. Accidentally calling someone mum/dad

40. Falling off a bike


41. Dribbling while sleeping on train

42. Seeing ink marks on your face

43. Leaving blobs of shaving foam on your face

44. Mum kissing you goodbye in public

45. Getting stuck in revolving doors

46. Accidentally cc’ing someone in an email about them

47. Shared something on social media that was meant to be a private message

48. Socks being tucked into your trousers

49. Accidentally sent a revealing picture to the wrong person

50. Having your towel stolen or taken while showering
 
The image came from a 1914 movie poster.

A memorable quotation from a painting

The Latin inscription at the lower left reads AUT TACE  AUT LOQUERE MELIORA  SILENTIO, which translates to:

“Let thy speech be better than silence, or be silent.”

The painting is Philosophy (from the 1640s), a self portrait by Salvator Rosa, an Italian baroque painter who lived from 1615 to 1673. Those words originally came from Dionysius of Halicarnassus.

On February 18, 2010 in his  Manner of Speaking blog John Zimmer used it as No. 17 in his series of over 140 Quotes for Public Speakers. 

On March 1st I blogged something similar: Is your presentation more useful than a facial tissue?

The image came from Wikimedia Commons.

PowerPoint Flaws and Failures: Having Your Content Parroted

Late in August I saw the full text to a 22-page article titled PowerPoint® Presentation Flaws and Failures: A Psychological Analysis that had appeared in July in Frontiers in Educational Psychology. That article was written by Stephen M. Kosslyn, Rogier A. Kievet, Alexandra G. Russell, and Jennifer M. Shephard.

It’s very interesting because Stephen M. Kosslyn has previously written a pair of books titled Clear and to the Point: 8 Psychological Principles for Compelling PowerPoint Presentations (2007), and Better PowerPoint: Quick Fixes Based on How Your Audience Thinks (2010). 

The article described three different studies. On September 1st in a post on Rules Commonly Broken I discussed the first one, which examined 140 presentations to see if they violated any of a set of 137 rules covering communication principles. On September 2nd in a post on a Survey of Common Flaws and Annoyances I discussed the second one. On September 3rd in a post on Do People Know and Understand What They’re Doing I discussed the third one. 

When I looked on Google I was surprised to find that all three of my posts has been parroted - the entire text had been copied and reposted on other TypePad blogs. My first post had appeared on Buckvvidella’s Blog, Dorsey Emerson’s Blog, and Nathaneal Foster 21’s Blog. My second post had shown up on Delrobles 86’s Blog, Hong Fernandez 19’s Blog, Peckalberto50’s Blog, and Stevens Kieth’s Blog. So far my third post only was on Riederuuin’s Blog. Those reposts did provide a link to my posts, but they did not contain links back to the original article that I had discussed.

I’m not amused by being copied wholesale, which is known as having your content scraped. You can get information either from the horse’s mouth, or out of the other end. Why would you choose the rear end? (The horse came from Wikimedia Commons).

UPDATE September 7, 2012

I was curious if this bait post also would be scraped. Today it showed up on a blog with the curious name of Platonic Best Friend Definition.  

PowerPoint Flaws and Failures: Do People Know and Understand What They’re Doing?

At PubMed Central I recently saw the full text to a 22-page article titled PowerPoint® Presentation Flaws and Failures: A Psychological Analysis that had appeared in July in Frontiers in Educational Psychology. That article was written by Stephen M. Kosslyn, Rogier A. Kievet, Alexandra G. Russell, and Jennifer M. Shephard.

It is of considerable interest because Stephen M. Kosslyn also has previously written a pair of books titled Clear and to the Point: 8 Psychological Principles for Compelling PowerPoint Presentations (2007), and Better PowerPoint: Quick Fixes Based on How Your Audience Thinks (2010). The article discusses three different studies.

In this post I will discuss the third one, which had 48 people (27 females and 21 males) look at sixty pairs of “ Do/Don’t” slides to identify which was the correct choice. 41 slides came right from Kosslyn’s 2007 book, and the others were added. Principles (and number of slide pairs covering them) were:

Appropriate knowledge (6) 
Compatibility (8) 
Discriminability (8) 
Informative Changes (8) 
Limited Capacity (8) 
Perceptual Organization (7) 
Relevance (8) 
Salience (7) 

A bar chart shows the percent of incorrect choices made between the Do and Don’t slide pairs. (Click on the chart to see a larger, clearer version). The wrong choice was made on average 20.5% of the time (or one out of five times). Participants did best at identifying slides for the principle of Appropriate Knowledge (6.6% wrong), and worst for both Compatibility and Salience (28.9% wrong).

What is the chance that a presentation with ten slides will have all of them correct? It’s 0.795 raised to the tenth power, or 0.1008. So, there’s only a 10% chance of getting a completely correct one.

Another bar chart shows the percentage of correct choices where the explanation for that choice was wrong. The wrong explanation was made on average 16.8% of the time (or one out of six times). Participants did best at explaining slides for the principle of Appropriate Knowledge (10.8% wrong), and worst for Informative Changes (21.8% wrong).

This study showed that a significant minority of people do not really know (20.5%) or understand (16.8%) how to use PowerPoint effectively. Perhaps at work they just were handed a 10 Minute Guide, and turned loose to struggle with the software.

PowerPoint Flaws and Failures: Survey of Common Flaws and Annoyances

At PubMed Central I saw the full text to a 22-page article titled PowerPoint® Presentation Flaws and Failures: A Psychological Analysis that had appeared in July in Frontiers in Educational Psychology. That article was written by Stephen M. Kosslyn, Rogier A. Kievet, Alexandra G. Russell, and Jennifer M. Shephard.

It’s of considerable interest because Stephen M. Kosslyn also has previously written a pair of books titled Clear and to the Point: 8 Psychological Principles for Compelling PowerPoint Presentations (2007), and Better PowerPoint: Quick Fixes Based on How Your Audience Thinks (2010).

The article describes three different studies. Yesterday I discussed the first one, about commonly broken rules. In this post I will discuss the second one, which was an online survey of 205 adults, (112 females, 83 males, and 10 who didn’t report their gender).

Participants were asked 42 questions divided among the following seven topics:

Appropriate Knowledge - 8 
Compatibility - 3 
Discriminability - 5 
Informative Change - 2 
Limited Capacity - 7 
Relevance - 12 
Salience - 4 

There also was one question about an unprepared speaker.

For each question the participants were asked to provide two rankings. The first was the proportion of presentations that had that flaw, as ranked on a zero to four scale where:

0 = None
1 =  Some 
2 = Half 
3 = Many 
4 = Virtually all 

The top ten most prevalent flaws (and their average ratings) were:

1. Presentation failed to convey a meaningful message because the main point was obscured by lots of irrelevant detail. (1.363) 

2. Slides contained too much material to absorb before the next slide was presented. (1.356)

3. Speaker read word-for-word from notes or from the slides themselves. (1.348)

4. Speaker did not inject any humor or illustrations to lighten complex material. (1.299) 

5. Speaker did not use a pointer or otherwise direct audience attention to important details on the slides. (1.279)  

6. Speaker went through the presentation too slowly. (1.265)

7. Speaker presented slides with a lot of text and then proceeded to talk while the audience was trying to read. (1.255)

8. Speaker used too much jargon. (1.249)

9. Speaker assumed the audience knew more than it did. (1.205)

10. Presentation failed to convey a meaningful message because not enough information was provided to support the main point. (1.201).

The second ranking, on a zero to three scale, was about the degree to which that problem bothered or annoyed them where:

0 = Not at all 
1 = Somewhat 
2 = A fair amount 
3 = Extremely annoying

The top ten most annoying flaws (and their average ratings) were:

1. Presentation failed to convey a meaningful message because the main point was obscured by lots of irrelevant detail. (1.340)

2. Speaker read word-for-word from notes or from the slides themselves. (1.315)

3. Presentation failed to convey a meaningful message because not enough information was provided to support the main point. (1.274)

4. Speaker went through the presentation too slowly. (1.262)

5. Slides contained too much material to absorb before the next slide was presented. (1.225)

6. Slides had text or graphics that were too small to see clearly. (1.195)

7. Presentation failed to convey a meaningful message because there was no main point. (1.170)

8. Speaker was talking about a topic that the audience did not care about. (1.162)

9. Speaker went over the allotted time (or rushed to finish in time). (1.117)

10. Speaker presented slides with a lot of text and then proceeded to talk while the audience was trying to read. (1.116)

Detailed results are shown in the Appendix to the magazine article. This survey provides a different perspective than Dave Paradi’s 2011 survey and 2009 survey, which had larger sample sizes but reported results from fewer questions.

PowerPoint Flaws and Failures: Rules Commonly Broken

Sometimes you can find an excellent recent magazine article that’s been completely ignored (so far) by all the bloggers posting at Alltop Speaking. A few days ago when I looked under PowerPoint at PubMed Central I saw the full text to a 22-page article titled PowerPoint® Presentation Flaws and Failures: A Psychological Analysis that had appeared in July in Frontiers in Educational Psychology. That article was written by Stephen M. Kosslyn, Rogier A. Kievet, Alexandra G. Russell, and Jennifer M. Shephard.

 It’s of considerable interest because Stephen M. Kosslyn also has previously written a pair of books titled Clear and to the Point: 8 Psychological Principles for Compelling PowerPoint Presentations (2007), and Better PowerPoint: Quick Fixes Based on How Your Audience Thinks (2010).

 The article discusses three different studies. In this post I will discuss the first one, which examined 140 presentations to see if they violated any of a set of 137 rules covering the following communication principles:

Appropriate knowledge (7 rules) 
Compatibility (19) 
Discriminability (25) 
Informative Changes (8) 
Limited Capacity (15) 
Perceptual Organization (17) 
Relevance (19) 
Salience (12) 
“Over-Determined” (17) 

Table 1 of the article lists of all the rules, and the proportion (or percentage) of presentations that violated each one. Ten of these rules were broken by over 50% of the presentations. The top ten (and their percentages) were:

1. Bulleted items are not presented individually, growing the list from the top to the bottom. (95.7%)

2. More than two lines are used per bulleted sentence. (91.4%) 

3. More than four bulleted items appear in a single list. (91.4%) 

4. Hierarchical organization of lists is not used, with no more than four items at each level. (85.7%) 

5. All uppercase, all italics, or all bold typefaces are used. (80.7%) 

6. Visual or auditory characteristics change even when they do not signal a change in information. (72.1%) 

7. Words are not large enough (i.e., greater than 20 point) to be easily read. (66.4%) 

8. There is no crisp ending to signal that the presentation, or a given part, is over. (64.3%) 

9. Deep, heavily saturated blue is used for text or graphics. (55.0%) 

10. Entries in a table are too small to be read easily. (51.4%) 


Another ten rules were broken by about a third of the presentations. These are:

11. Bullets do not introduce topic sentences/phrases or specific cases. (47.1%) 

12. Underlining is used. (46.4%) 

13. Colors shimmer. (42.1%) 

14. Photos and clipart become too grainy when inserted into the slide. (41.4%) 

15. Either more or less detail than required for the point is presented. (37.9%) 

16. Serif and sans serif are mixed arbitrarily. (37.1%) 

17. Red and blue are used in adjacent regions. (35.7%) 

18. Non-standard or unfamiliar display formats are used. (34.3%) 

19. Different colors are not being used for emphasis or to specify. (32.9%) 

20. The most important content element is not the most salient. (32.1%) 

A pair of bar charts shown above list the 34 rules (by category) that were broken by 15% or more (roughly one-sixth) of the presentations. (Click on a chart to see a larger, clearer version). That’s 25 percent, the commonly broken rules, so you can apply the Pareto Principle to fix what you’ve been doing.

Table 2 of the article lists what proportion (or percentage) of those communication principles were broken by presentations in five categories: Business, Research, Government, Education, and Miscellaneous. For all categories, 100% of the presentations violated principles of both Disciminability and Limited Capacity.

Results from this study provide an excellent guide for improving your presentations. If you’d like to read even more how and why, then go to Amazon and buy the Kindle editions of both of Stephen Kosslyn’s books.

UPDATE September 30, 2012

It took a while, but Gavin McMahon, whose Make a Powerful Point blog is linked to at Alltop Speaking, also discussed the article in a series of three posts titled This is Your Brain on PowerPoint:

Part 1, September 24th

Part 2, September 25th

Part 3, September 26th