Crap Circles
Posted by Felix Enescu on August 3rd, 2006
I am still digging through old articles. I just found a “cool” one about presentations. It was published in November 2005 issue of Harvard Business Review.
The article is about never ending circles that are poisoning every presentation.
A short quote:
“[..] a Boston-based software company helpfully illustrates the stages of its application management life cycle. Through some trick of causality, termination leads to deployment. This may be a good model from a consultancy’s standpoint—when a client’s projects end, they start again—but if you’re paying the tab, you probably want the project to actually end when it’s terminated.”
And the picture:
Next time when you see a presentation guiding you in circles, stop for a second and ask if this really makes any sense.
As Gardiner Morse said:
“Though you’ve seen a million of these, you’ve probably never thought much about them. That’s because, like optical illusions, they play on your expectations and trick you into seeing something that isn’t there: If one arrow leads to the next, then of course the steps follow. But once you start examining these ubiquitous diagrams, you’ll be amazed by what you don’t see.“