Tufte, Presidential Panels and PowerPoint Ninjas posted by Rick Howard

Filed in: Dr. Edward Tufte

I'll admit it. I am a fan boy for Dr. Edward Tufte, professor emeritus of political science, statistics and computer science at Yale. In my opinion, he is the world's leading expert on how to display complex data in a visual form. When I learned last week that President Obama had appointed him to advise the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, I was elated. The board's mission is to monitor the way the US Government is spending the $787 billion stimulus package. There is not a better person for the job.

I ran into Dr. Tufte almost a decade ago when I was still in the service. I was running the Army's Computer Emergency Response Team at the time and we were struggling with how to convey the complex concepts of network defense, network offense and network exploitation to Army leadership; mostly to generals who had spent their entire Army careers leading infantrymen, tankers and artillerymen into battle. These guys are smart but they do not spend a lot of time in the land of Ones and Zeros. I needed help. A friend of mine suggested Dr. Tufte's traveling seminar that just happened to be in town that week.

I was stunned.

He spent eight hours running the audience through a historical cornucopia of visual presentations, both bad and good, to illustrate what works and what does not work. His famous example-- how NASA's engineers might have failed to prevent the Challenger Space Shuttle catastrophe in 1986 because a badly designed slide deck did not convince NASA leadership to scrub the launch-- is bone chilling. His more positive example-- how Dr. John Snow was able to determine the cause of London's Cholera epidemic of 1854 by plotting the deaths on a city map and learning that a communal water hole was the most likely source-- is inspiring.

As a former soldier, I am most impressed with Charles Joseph Minard's chart depicting the folly of invading into Russia. Tufte thinks that this is "[p]robably the best statistical graphic ever drawn." On one chart, Minard displays the gross losses of Napoleon's Army as it traveled to Moscow (Tan Line left to right) and retreated back (Black Line right to left), the time frame it took, the weather and temperature that accompanied the Army and the devastating personnel loss of doing multiple river crossings in the dead of winter during a retreat. Germany's generals would have learned a lot from this chart before they tried and failed to do the same thing in World War II.

For the price of the course, Dr. Tufte gives you all four of his books on the subject:

• The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, 2nd edition
• Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative
• Envisioning Information
• Beautiful Evidence

That night, I ran home to devour the books. Over the course of a few evenings, I could do nothing but sift through example after example of charts and displays from China's Railway Table of 1985 to Galileo's proof that sun spots were not orbiting the sun, but were actually part of it. I recommend all of the books highly and, of course, if you get the chance to attend the seminar, just do it. You will not be disappointed. I have since been back to attend a second time.

You may be asking yourself just what does all of this have to do with security. I am glad you asked.

Like most of you, I do a lot of presentations. In fact, I am a PowerPoint Ninja. I have done so many presentations that I am getting close to the magic 10,000 hour number that Malcolm Gladwell mentions in his book, "Outliers: the Story of Success." I am usually educating an audience on some security matter or trying to convince leadership to give me something that I want. In both cases, how I present the information is key to the success.

You will be interested to know that Dr. Tufte hates PowerPoint; at least the default way that most people use it: Title, 3-5 bullets of text, spinning doughnuts that have nothing at all to do with the presentation. In his seminar, Dr. Tufte does not use it. The fact is though that PowerPoint, and its non-Microsoft equivalents, are tools of the trade for most businesses and especially for security people. We need to report status, explain technical issues and beg for money to start and maintain pet projects. We all use a PowerPoint equivalent to do it. More importantly, we as security professionals have to build the charts and diagrams and graphs that we stuff into those slide decks and other written reports to make our point. Even though Dr. Tufte hates PowerPoint, his design guidelines will help you build better decks and reports.

According to Tufte, "Presentations largely stand or fall on the quality, relevance, and integrity of the content. If your numbers are boring, then you've got the wrong numbers. If your words or images are not on point, making them dance in color won't make them relevant. Audience boredom is usually a content failure, not a decoration failure."

He is now helping the government explain where it is spending the stimulus money at recovery.org. According to Newsweek, "The result, as anyone who has spent significant amounts of time scouring government Web sites for information will tell you, is perhaps the clearest, richest interactive database ever produced by the American bureaucracy."

That is exactly my point.

(1 Comment)