The problem

The difficulty, however, was the engineers in NASA were not 100 percent sure the shuttle was undermined because foam strikes occur all the time without damage. What they needed was a photograph of the shuttle in space taken with high-resolution spy cameras to see if there was indeed damage to the wing as they suspected.

Now, getting a satellite photograph of this nature is expensive business and must be justified to senior management in NASA. Why was this foam strike different from any other that had occurred in the past?

This was the question NASA management needed an answer to. In the hope of getting the approval for the photograph, the engineers, based on 3 reports, prepared a presentation with a total of 28 PowerPoint slides to present.

The engineers’ approach to preparing this PowerPoint presentation was a typical Slide-Based Approach. Using the PowerPoint slides as a structuring tool and a presentation aid:

• They began the presentation with a general introduction to foam strikes and their history.
• They then went into detail on all the past foam strikes that had occurred and had been tested for. Ensuring to cover all the detail, including many instances when foam strikes did not cause damage.
• Then, at the very end, they delivered the key message.

This approach of moving from general information about a topic through detail and data to get to a concluding key point is called deductive reasoning. Simply put this means building up to your strongest point instead of leading with it.

This approach was also very evident in their slides. The bullet points moved from large, general, more optimistic bullet points to concluding, smaller, lower-level bullet points mentioning doubts and uncertainties.

I would like to show you what I mean.

The slide

Below is the final slide the engineers presented to NASA. This is the slide that tried to save lives.

Do you have any idea what the key message is here?

Because they had used deductive reasoning and a slide-based approach when preparing this 28-slide presentation, the engineers placed the key message as a fourth-level sub-bullet in the PowerPoint on the last slide.

The key message the engineers wanted to get across was – ‘Flight condition is significantly outside of test database’.

What they were trying to communicate was that this foam strike was outside of anything they had seen or tested for in the history of NASA.

The decision

Let me remind you what the purpose of this presentation was. The engineers believed (they feared) seven astronauts were in space in a shuttle with a damaged wing. They wanted a satellite photograph to verify this. They needed budget sign off from NASA management for the photograph.

They didn’t get it.

The relevant NASA managers attended the presentation given by the engineers and made a decision.

They decided the Space Shuttle Columbia was safe and there was no need for a photograph.

On 1 February 2003, the Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated on re-entry to earth and all seven astronauts died.

The foam strike that occurred during the launch created a hole in the wing, resulting in the disintegration of the shuttle, exactly as the engineers had suspected all along.

The investigation

After this terrible accident the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB) was set up to investigate how this tragedy could have occurred.

As you would suspect this was a very detailed investigation and blame was found in many places, one being the culture of NASA (this is a whole other book) and the other being the communication.

Specifically, the CAIB found fault with the 28-slide PowerPoint presentation the engineers prepared and delivered to the management in NASA.

The CAIB concluded that despite an abundance of data, the crucial message, that the shuttle was in imminent danger, was completely lost.

They determined that:

Key information was so buried and condensed in the rigid format of the PowerPoint slide that it was rendered useless.

They also criticised the use of PowerPoint as a preparation tool saying it was:

• An obstacle to internal communication
• Had a dampening effect on clear thought and expression.

And had the uncertainties been more clearly expressed, the need to inspect the wing may have been more obvious.

“It is easy to understand how a senior manager might read this PowerPoint slide and not realise that it addresses a life-threatening situation,”

The Columbia Accident Investigation Board concluded, citing Edwards Tufte’s work.

The conclusion

The crucial message of the presentation was completely lost because of a presentation structure that does not account for how we listen and engage as human beings.

The presentation the engineers delivered:

• Was complex, when it should have been clear and concise
• Demonstrated data, when it should have been delivering key messages
• Was overloaded with facts and statistics giving different perspectives, when it should have been organised by giving only critical detail at the early stages of the presentation

The truth is the engineers struggled to do what we are all struggling to do – They struggled to simplify their message.

And they are not alone. The need to make the complex understandable is the biggest challenge all presenters face today.

Most business people today are:

• Given product/technical training to equip them to be experts but no methodology to take this knowledge and talk about what they do in an impactful and meaningful way to their audience
• Given multiple slides from multiple sources but no technique that allows them to pick out the critical messages
• Talking about their concepts or products but are not necessarily equipped with the ability to relate these to the audience and talk about real business problems or needs

This book aims to change that.

For more details on the CAIB report and Edward Tufte’s finding please visit www.edwardtufte.com