as soon as they graduate, our people return to a world driven by a tool that is the antithesis of thinking: PowerPoint. Make no mistake, PowerPoint is not a neutral tool -- it is actively hostile to thoughtful decision-making. It has fundamentally changed our culture by altering the expectations of who makes decisions, what decisions they make and how they make them.
Hammes explains why. First, staff officers focus their intellectual energy on transforming a complex topic into a series of visually appealing slides, rather than writing a cleartext summary. Precious energy is wasted on slide layout details and bullets do a poor job conveying the necessary information to decision makers. Second, PowerPoint briefs tend towards information overload and emphasize quantity over quality. Third, decision makers spend more time watching slides and less time deliberating and thinking than they did in the pre-PowerPoint era. Fourth, the efficiency of PowerPoint means decision-makers can schedule more and more briefs in a given day, which leads them to reach farther and farther down the chain in search of decisions to make.
In my opinion, the root problem isn't PowerPoint itself; the problem is a bloated bureaucracy and individual commanders who require that their personnel spend inordinate amounts of time on redundant and ultimately meaningless staff work. PowerPoint plays into that. In my experience many of the most time-consuming briefs are actually required by Air Force Instructions. Preferences of individual commanders can make these briefs better or worse. I had one commander who loved PowerPoint and constantly asked us to create new presentations of the same data. Rather than managing the squadron's training (our job), our shop spent almost the entire week preparing slides. I balked when my commander asked me to add a new slide that I estimated would take 3-4 hours a week to update. He was adamant.
This PowerPoint bloat parallels another broken staff function: writing performance reports. Officers don't write thoughtful and accurate reports on a subordinate's performance; they spend countless hours trying to fit their reports into a ridiculous, misshapen mold that has evolved over time. If they deviate, the report bounces back from Group or Wing with a long list of edits. The pilot you're rating has "hands of gold"? Sorry, the current commander has forbidden the use of precious metals in reports. Line 6 has four white spaces at the end; the limit is three. "Pilot" should be abbreviated "plt" and the extra space used to lengthen the bullet elsewhere. I wasted a year of my life as an Executive Officer, doing these kinds of edits four or five hours a day. Unfortunately, everybody has to play the game, because their subordinates' careers depend on it.
This staff environment is toxic. It burns people out for all the wrong reasons. I was deployed 200-250 days a year while flying C-17s. With that kind of ops tempo, commanders should look for ways to reduce the workload at home. Instead, we were swamped at home. Offices were always undermanned, so for my first year at McChord, our AFI-mandated post-mission crew rest (recuperation days) were waived down to a single day. I know many officers who were so busy with staff work during the week that they had to fly their training locals on weekends. The worst part? Much of this work is useless. I was constantly burned out because I had so little job satisfaction in the office. I hated being away from my wife while traveling, but after two weeks in the office writing performance reports, I couldn't wait to leave on a mission. It kept me sane. My most valuable contributions to the Air Force--like writing a program to interface Google Earth with DOD mission planning software--came on my own time. I love the direction my career has turned--learning Arabic and studying the Middle East--but I'm frankly dreading returning to the staff world, where I fear I won't have time for that.
The important question is what we do about these problems. I'm skeptical about our ability to transform the military's organizational culture, but individual commanders can make a big difference for the people in their organizations. Bureaucracies always to try to grow and multiply work; these laws work like gravity. Good commanders should constantly be looking for ways to fight back, to eliminate redundancy and useless work, and to steer their people toward productive work.
0 comments:
Post a Comment