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It’s pretty rare that you find an intersection between information design, interaction design, politics, and war but as James Fallows writes in the December 2004 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, such an intersection most surely exists in the form of Microsoft PowerPoint. In his article, “Will Iran Be Next?”, Fallows describes a war game organized by the Atlantic Monthly. The war game was basically an exercise in role-playing, with the participants discussing the various options available to the U.S. President if and when there is incontrovertible evidence that Iran is on the verge of creating a nuclear weapon.

Although the results of the game were disturbing enough (simply put, Iran is most definitely developing a nuclear weapon and there is no military option for stopping them), perhaps even more disturbing for those of us aware of the inherent limitations and weaknesses of PPT-think, was Fallows’ observation about the role of PowerPoint in military planning.

Case in point are these two paragraphs, separated in the original article by a few pages:

His commitment to realism extended to presenting all his information in a series of PowerPoint slides, on which U.S. military planners are so dependent that is is hard to imagine how Dwight Eisenhower pulled off D-Day without them. PowerPoint’s imperfections as a deliberative tool are well known. Its formulaic outline structure can over-emphasize some ideas or options and conceal others, and the amateurish graphic presentation of data often impedes understanding. But any simulation of a modern military exercise would be unconvincing without it.

…

Then there was option No. 3. Gardiner called this plan “moderate risk,” but said the best judgement of the military was that it would succeed. To explain it he spent thirty minutes presenting the very sorts of slides most likely to impress civilians: those with sweeping arrows indicating the rapid movement of men across terrain. (When the exercise was over, I told David Kay that an observer who had not often seen such charts remarked on how “cool” they looked. “Yes, and the longer you’ve been around, the more you learn to be skeptical of the ‘cool’ factor in PowerPoint,” Kay said. “I don’t think the President had seen many charts like that before,” he added, referring to President Bush as he reviewed war plans for Iraq.)

It is, to put it mildly, extremely disturbing to learn that the most powerful military in world history is heavily reliant on PowerPoint — a tool which so easily affords the dangerous combination of engaging graphics and sloppy thought.

Last week I had the good fortune to attend a presentation by James Dyson, inventor of the Dyson vacuum among a collage of other things, including an amazing new washing machine. Confirming my belief that there this a definite pattern to innovation, Dyson struck on many familiar themes:

• Vision. Where others accepted a vacuum that didn’t work well, Dyson saw a problem that needed a better solution. He identified a problem ignored by others and went about solving it.
• Persistence. To create the Dyson vacuum he built over 5,000 prototypes. That’s nearly three a day for five years.
• Confidence. Like all great inventors and visionaries Dyson had great confidence in his idea and kept going no matter what others thought or said.
• Leadership. Although Dyson and his team relied on users to help validate ideas and prototypes, they didn’t look to them for leadership or vision.
• Patience. It takes a long time to succeed. Even after the invention was perfected it still took a decade for the business to develop.

In addition, Dyson noted that true innovation requires a fundamental rethinking of the problem, not simply a new coat of paint. A point that is all too often missed by those that think the Dyson vacuum is all about yellow plastic, that the iMac is nothing but a colored shell, or that Disneyland is just another theme park.

In addition to his comments on innovation and invention, Dyson also offered some interesting perspective on intellectual property and how the patent system fails to protect small inventors.

Nothing quite like the inspiration that accompanies the presence of genius.