PowerPointing Our Way Through the Third World

A friend of mine was recently turned down for a job because he wasn't familiar enough with PowerPoint. Not the software itself, he was told, but the "PowerPoint way of thinking."

I didn't know there was such a thing, or how marketable it apparently is, until I read Martin Kimani's essay. The PowerPoint way of thinking is under elegant and deserved attack in his piece, "The Revolution Will Not Come by PowerPoint." It's a must-read for anyone interested in Africa or aid, and especially both. For those of us who went to grad school to get a grip on STATA and learn how to do a log frame, Kimani's observations are a breath of fresh air.

They're also a threat to the way the entire aid complex works -- or they should be.

He quietly catalogs some of the errors in the countless presentations across the continent, and beyond. Confusing correlations and causation. Exaggerating the meaning of the mean. Ignoring history, circumstance, and context.

Kimani doesn't see these as simple procedural errors; they are symptoms of the assumptions of the system. "Resistance to acknowledging the power of chance and the outlier is motivated by the desire to control or at least be seen to control events and society," he writes. "To do this, history must be erased and the human condition must be ruthlessly stripped and turned into a number."

His is a scathing indictment without being caustic or cheeky, and it goes beyond PowerPoint and the aid community. Kimani's critique demands a reconsideration of the way we do any kind of policy work. What's the (proper) role of the aggregate -- and of the individual?

I'm not advocating we all drop statistics class and flee from numbers. But Kimani's powerful essay suggests that when we use them, we should pause and consider a wider continuum of human experience than what can come before a percentage sign.

Photo credit: mp_eds