Love Letters Tied to Bricks: Pitfalls of Presentations as Professional Communication

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Lostumbo, Michael J.

Language:

English

Other Title:

Love Letters Tied to Bricks

Place of Publication:

RAND Corporation 2024

Summary:

Research on effective communication is advancing and the tools to analyze and present sophisticated analysis are rapidly improving, but these improved techniques are often not used in U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) briefings. DoD policies, including limits on the number of slides presented and the desire for slides to stand alone without the presenter's remarks, exacerbate this problem. As a result, DoD briefings are visually and textually brick-like in their information density and can be challenging for audiences to interpret. Extensive cognitive psychology research provides strong evidence that briefings can overwhelm the limited attention capacity of an audience. Presenters should seek to focus the audience's attention and achieve greater comprehension. In this report, the author discusses findings from a literature review and informal interviews with officials in the DoD analytic community on data visualization tools, in-house data visualization expertise, briefing production workflow, and current constraints on the briefing form. The author highlights some of the relevant empiric research and offers specific strategies for improving the design of graphic elements, slides, and presentations used in DoD briefings and audiences' understanding and retention of presented information.