Timothy B. Lee examines the work of Yale statistician Edward Tufte. There are definitely lessons to be learned here. Surely Tufte is correct in highlighting the compartmentalization of information imposed by the Boeing Powerpoint slides. And I think prof. Tufte would agree with Lee on the distortions produced by the “information funnel” that is inherent in hierarchical organizations (or filing systems for that matter).
Aside: I wish that it had been Prof. Tufte who had responsibility for that Boeing presentation – the NASA decision would likely have been very different. For more, please see the Tufte monograph The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint, discussed in this Wired op-ed..
In 2003, the world watched, shocked, as the Space Shuttle Columbia exploded as it was re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere. NASA investigated and concluded that Columbia exploded because during take-off, a bit of foam fell off the shuttle and hit the wing. The shuttle made it to orbit safely, but on re-entry the damage from the foam was enough to destroy the vehicle.
The astonishing thing about the Columbia tragedy is that NASA engineers not only noticed the foam in the take-off video, they even realized that it could cause problems on re-entry. Indeed, while the space shuttle was still in orbit, NASA hired a Boeing team to conduct an analysis of the potential damage. Tragically, after hearing the Boeing team’s report, NASA decided to go ahead with the re-entry.
Edward Tufte is a legendary statistician and graphic designer whose research has focused on the challenges of clearly and accurately conveying complex empirical information. In an analysis of the Columbia disaster, he blames PowerPoint for the shuttle’s explosion. Specifically, he argues that when the Boeing team presented its findings to senior NASA officials, the limitations of the PowerPoint format became an impediment to clear communication:
(…) While Tufte blames PowerPoint, it’s clear that what he’s talking about is fundamentally a management problem. It’s true that PowerPoint bullets are a lousy way to communicate complex technical information. But it’s also not a coincidence that middle managers love them so much. A big part of the job of a middle manager is act as a kind of information funnel: to gather information from dozens or hundreds of people below him in the hierarchy and communicate it in condensed form to the people above. The beauty of bullet point is that it makes it possible to present complex information in arbitrarily truncated form while glossing over details that the presenter may not fully understand.
This “information funnel†function is essential to the role Paul Graham describes managers playing in hierarchical organizations: to make a big group of people appear to upper management as if it were a single person. A given manager might be an MBA who’s never computed a rocket trajectory in his life, but when there’s a meeting of the organization’s senior staff, he’s a stand-in for the 100 aerospace engineers who report to him. Not only is it unreasonable to expect him to accurately represent the knowledge and concerns of all 100 people, it’s not even reasonable to expect him to understand the views of all those people. Yet it would be awkward for the manager to admit that he has only a vague idea of what a lot of the people under him do. So he’s going to gravitate toward a presentation style that allows him to sound authoritative while summarizing information he may or may not understand in any detail.
A related phenomenon is a tendency toward excessive optimism within large bureaucracies. People dislike giving their bosses bad news. Given that managers have to summarize and abbreviate the information their employees give them anyway, there’s going to be a natural tendency to pay less attention to negative results than positive ones. And this tendency gets amplified when there are multiple layers of reporting: At each layer, bad news gets pruned more aggressively than the good news, and so the glasses get more and more rose-tinted. The information that bubbles up to the top of the hierarchy can be massively skewed and incomplete.
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