U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) briefings often are visually and textually brick-like in their information density and challenging for audiences to interpret. In this report, the author summarizes empirical research on how visual information is interpreted and offers recommendations to improve the effectiveness of visual rhetoric and slide design for briefings of complex analysis in DoD and other professional settings.

Love Letters Tied to Bricks

Pitfalls of Presentations as Professional Communication

Michael J. Lostumbo

ResearchPublished Sep 24, 2024

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.

Key Findings

  • Accurately interpreting the graphic, textual, and oral content of a briefing requires time and effort from an audience.
  • Extensive cognitive psychology research provides strong evidence that briefings can easily overwhelm the very limited attention capacity of an audience.
  • Audiences choose how much attention to afford each slide, and a design style that demands a lot of effort risks losing their attention.
  • Within DoD, several common practices exacerbate the overall communication problem caused by information-dense briefings.

Recommendations

  • DoD should eliminate slide limits on briefings. Briefers will need to craft enough slides to tell their story in the time allotted.
  • DoD should eliminate guidance to craft slides as though they need to stand alone. The practice within the analytic community of producing short, written reports that back key briefings to senior leaders provides the opportunity for a more complete record of the work. Additionally, briefers could consider delivering one-page memos to audiences ahead of briefings.
  • Presenters should use slide titles to convey the main point and only make one main point per slide.
  • Presenters should minimize the textual content of each slide to a few succinct points relevant to the assertion of the slide's title.
  • Presenters should limit the number of bullets and the number of lines of each bullet and make the font size large enough to be easily legible in the briefing forum.
  • Presenters should use slide builds that successively add content to each slide from top to bottom to keep audience attention focused on the pertinent information at the proper time and not overwhelm the audience with too much visual information all at once.
  • Presenters should make the slide's key graphic element stand out through a combination of visual and semantic encoding. Ensure that speakers explain the elements of each figure to relieve the audience's cognitive burden.

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Document Details

  • Copyright: RAND Corporation
  • Availability: Available
  • Year: 2024
  • Print Format: Paperback
  • Paperback Pages: 48
  • Paperback Price: $16.50
  • Paperback ISBN/EAN: 1-9774-1407-9
  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.7249/RRA2869-1
  • Document Number: RR-A2869-1

Citation

RAND Style Manual
Lostumbo, Michael J., Love Letters Tied to Bricks: Pitfalls of Presentations as Professional Communication, RAND Corporation, RR-A2869-1, 2024. As of October 10, 2024: https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA2869-1.html
Chicago Manual of Style
Lostumbo, Michael J., Love Letters Tied to Bricks: Pitfalls of Presentations as Professional Communication. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2024. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA2869-1.html. Also available in print form.
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This research was sponsored by the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD), Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation (CAPE) and the Analysis Working Group and conducted within the International Security and Defense Policy Program of the RAND National Security Research Division (NSRD).

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