On January 28, 1986, the Nasa space shuttle Challenger broke apart just 73 seconds into its flight, killing all seven crew members. This tragedy highlighted the potential dangers of PowerPoint, and could be the key to reaching your clients on a deeper level.

It emerged from software company Forethought Inc., a Silicon Valley hothouse, in the 1980s. The program, initially named Presenter, was first released – on the Apple Macintosh – in 1987. Bob Gaskins was the man behind it.

“I knew in the early 80s that there were as many as a billion, a thousand million presentation slides being made per year just in America,” Gaskins says, “but they were all made by hand and almost nobody was using computers to do so.”

Before PowerPoint, people used slides, overhead projectors and acetate films to convey information to groups – but anyone creating a presentation had to send away to get their materials made. It took a long time to do, was difficult to make changes and because it was so expensive, only the most senior people in an organisation got to do it.

The age of the personal computer gave access to everyone in the company to express their ideas in a cost-effective and time-efficient way. Suddenly everyone from the CEO to the mailroom clerk had the opportunity to present their ideas to the company.

A competitive environment has reduced budgets, resulting in lack of time for work to be completed, lack of edcation of how to use powerpoint as a tool, and lack of confidence in ones ideas and story result in 100s of slides being presented, cramming in as much information as possible and overwhelming clients.

To demonstrate this, let’s return to the original story of the Challenger space shuttle. The primary problem that brought down the space shuttle had been included within a slide presentation given to Nasa before the mission. But it was surrounded by so much other information, buried in a stack of bullet points, it was effectively hidden and therefore missed.

The problem was compounded by the fact that the slide in question contained conflicting information. The top line read;

“The lack of a good secondary seal in the field joint is most critical and ways to reduce joint rotation should be incorporated as soon as possible to reduce criticality.”

With the bottom line reading;

“Analysis of existing data indicates that it is safe to continue flying existing design as long as all joints are leak checked* with a 200 psig stabilization . . .”

I was struck by the contradiction: “If it’s ‘most critical,’ how could it be ‘safe to continue flying’?