Crap Circles

I am still digging through old articles. I just found a “cool” one about presentations. I 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.“