Past, Present, and Future: Excel, Word, PowerPoint
Geoffrey Moore
Author, speaker, advisor, best known for Crossing the Chasm, Zone to Win and The Infinite Staircase. Board Member of nLight, WorkFusion, and Phaidra. Chairman Emeritus Chasm Group & Chasm Institute.
Okay, I admit it.?I am a late adopter, and so I still use Microsoft Office on a Windows laptop, and yes, it works just fine for me.?But that is not the point of this post.?Instead, this is a tool-matching exercise, for you, not for me.
My ask of you is that you use a spreadsheet to understand your past, a text document to understand your present, and a presentation to understand your future.?Most important of all, I want you to do your best to avoid relying heavily on any of these tools outside its preferred time zone.
Let’s start with spreadsheets.?They record the past.?They give you the unvarnished facts about bookings, revenues, accounts, shipments, quality metrics—you name it.?They are invaluable for this purpose.?Spreadsheets can give you some insight into the present, but here they lack context, and context often matters a great deal.?Still, used sparingly, they are more help than hindrance.?Using spreadsheets to foresee the future, on the other hand, is like accelerating forward while looking in your rearview mirror.?Although this point seems obvious enough, I have never seen a future-oriented strategy presentation that does not revert to spreadsheets sooner or later.?I would just remind you, there is no data about the future.?These are only extrapolations from the past.?
PowerPoint presentations, on the other hand, are designed specifically to speak to the future.?They help us tell stories about what could be.?Stories, or in more academic terms, narratives, are humankind’s best tool for exploring future possibilities.?They draw on shared past experiences, from which they extract patterns, models, or frameworks.?They build credibility by showing how these patterns recur over and over again and thus can reasonably be applied to tackling a pending opportunity or challenge.?They suppress a lot of detail in order to foreground the overall pattern.?This is fine for speculating about what is to come, but when you apply this approach to the present, to what is happening right now, you learn that the fit between narrative and fact is never perfect.?Persisting in presentation mode at this point is likely to suppress evidence contradicting the narrative, leading to a false confidence in its actual validity.?Advocates take this chance all the time because they believe in their narratives and want them to carry the day.?Understandable as this is, it inevitably leaves messes in its wake that will not go away.?Reality will always emerge eventually, and suppressed issues do not get better with age.?Finally, when it comes to applying PowerPoint to the past, it becomes prone to cherry-picking the facts that support your narrative and suppressing the rest.?This is a form of revisionist history that seeks to retroactively establish a level of credibility that is not warranted, thereby putting any future decisions based on its premises at risk.
All of which brings us to text documents.?Text is best for context.?When you write things out in sentences, and link up the sentences with connectives like therefore, on the other hand, for this reason, and the like, you build a train of thought that can be tested claim by claim and link by link.?This is overkill for future narratives where the sheer number of possibilities overwhelms a linear approach.?It can be useful for understanding the past by supplementing the numerical analysis of spreadsheets with natural language analytics hypothesizing cause and effect.?But it is most valuable in the present where risk-bearing decisions need careful consideration with high integrity. Bezos knew what he was doing when he insisted that management sessions start with memos rather than presentations.?
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That’s what I think.?What do you think?
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CEO @ CONXTD Technologies Ltd | Risk Management Software
3 年I think you need a log in to monday.com and Dropbox Paper. The rigid tools of the past don’t cut it in the fluid present. Love your work.
Global Medical Device Marketing / Clinical Strategy/ Reimbursement
3 年Interesting food for thought. I find myself operating in this way. Spreadsheets for numerial analysis, PPT slides for telling a story, text for explaining in writing. Although, most of us corporate people are doing most of our writing in emails....
Pebble Geo (it's decent borehole log software)
3 年I agree in principle here. In practice, I have found that when dealing with a future that is not very far away (maybe in the order of a few days or a few weeks, depending on the product or initiative), then the text format is quite powerful for (future state) narratives. I think this works for me because the number of possibilities is limited by the short time-frame. The very act of writing them clarifies the thought process and tests mental assumptions.
Founder and CEO at GRID
3 年I'd like to challenge the assumption that spreadsheets are about the past and not about the future. What spreadsheets are best at (but far from the only thing they're used for) is business modeling to explore "alternate realities", doing "what-if" analysis to envision different scenarios or ranges of scenarios. That's not assuming that the future is set in stone, but to understand the drivers needed to reach certain goals. As far as numbers go, the past is recorded in databases and typically visualized in BI tools, but 99% of numerical thinking about the future happens in spreadsheets. As we speak, 100s of millions of people are beginning the annual budgeting process for 2022, hopes, plans and dreams that will be explored and encoded in spreadsheets.