"We are put on this earth to give and receive briefings."—Edwin L. Key (Mitre Corp.)

Many years ago, folks would have a meeting and one or more would present some subject—orally—and, maybe, draw something on the blackboard or show a chart that conveyed some technical or business data. Or one could go to a conference and folks would present papers and give reports of studies—orally. Sometimes to convey the message, it was necessary to include a picture, a graph, an equation, a chart, or a table. If the conference was large, that information had to be projected onto a big screen. For this, 35-millimeter slides were used. Preparation of these slides was sufficiently difficult that they were only used when necessary to convey key information.

All that's gone. Now we have briefings where the presenter reads words projected on a screen or, even worse, asks the audience to read them. Even at the smallest gathering, any person asked beforehand to say a few words on some subject prepares such a briefing.

What happened? How did we give up logic and data to descend into this morass of pointless words, buzz phrases, and gimmicky artwork? In short, the briefing ! And now, even worse, the PowerPoint briefing? And, more importantly, how do we get out of it?

Looking back over the years, it's now clear that it all started with the overhead projector, the Viewgraph machine, which provided an easy way to project material, especially words—not information, just words—on a large screen.

Now, I have a confession to make. I bear some responsibility for this tragedy. Back in the 1950s, when the U.S. first got stirred up about defending itself from Soviet bombers with nuclear weapons, I worked at Airborne Instruments Laboratory (AIL). Among our various programs was a small effort supporting the Air Defense Command (ADC). It should be noted that this national concern led directly to the creation of two of the nation's valuable institutions: Lincoln Labs and the Mitre Corporation.

One of our tasks was to evaluate several Air Force developments, including a device that projected radar plots onto a large board. As the leader of this effort, I was trying to figure out some way of projecting relevant status information—such as ready interceptors, call signs, frequencies—on the side of the same board. In a search of optical magazines, I came across a machine made by a small company in New Jersey. It was called a Vu-graph projector. It was a large boxy thing with a nice black paint finish and good optics. It also had a roll of plastic that one could write on with a grease pencil. The ad showed a professor lecturing to a large class and writing on the plastic roll while deriving some equation. After a few lines, he could turn a crank and roll to a fresh part. All of this was projected on a large screen above and behind him and, thus, visible to and readable by a large class. I bought one of these, and we set it up to project various kinds of semi-static information that would be of interest to the senior military officers and controllers viewing the overall situation.

One day, a couple of bright young ADC captains stopped by to review the program. (By the way, it's always the bright young folks in every field who bring about change, usually for the better—although not so in this case.) They asked many good questions about the program but seemed especially taken with that Vu-graph projector, noting the name and manufacturer. A couple months later, I visited their command headquarters to get a fill in on various issues and—lo and behold—there was one of the machines. Then the commanding officer, a well-tanned colonel, got up with a stack of transparencies and gave what I believe was the very first "modern" military briefing!

After that came fancier projectors—in colored cases, some with a built-in spare bulb, some quite portable. This was followed by the use of two screens with two briefers—the so-called "dog-and-pony" approach. And the practice spread from the military to its contractors; to federal, state, and local government groups at all levels; to all types of industries and their many associations and even to most nations. It's impossible to attend any meeting, even with as few as a half dozen folks gathered around a table, without receiving one or more briefings.

And so it has gone with the final descent into the content-free world of the computer-driven PowerPoint briefing. It is a fact: the surest and quickest way to remove the content from a report is to put it on PowerPoint. In a typical PowerPoint briefing, the briefer just reads the lines on each chart and occasionally adds some additional material. Further, the briefing is rarely put together by the briefer. So, it's not uncommon for some puzzled, poorly prepared briefer who you later realize doesn't know the subject and is very likely seeing some of the graphics for the first time, to say, "I'll just let you read this slide." Furthermore, these briefings are filled with the current crop of hackneyed buzzwords and phrases. (As someone once said, "There's a cult of 'bad is good enough'.")