Most bowtie diagrams in the world live in PowerPoint. That is not a criticism — office tools are free, everyone has them, and for a first workshop output they are perfectly serviceable. This guide shows you how to draw a clean bowtie in PowerPoint or Excel, and then is honest about the point where a drawing tool starts costing you more than it saves.
If you are new to the method itself, read What is the bowtie method? first — this article assumes you know what threats, barriers, top events and consequences are.
The layout rules that make a bowtie readable
Whatever tool you use, a bowtie earns its readability from a few conventions:
- The top event sits in the centre. One knot, one loss of control. If you find yourself wanting two centre boxes, you have two bowties.
- Threats enter from the left, consequences exit to the right. Preventive barriers sit on the threat lines; recovery barriers sit on the consequence lines.
- One row per pathway. Each threat gets its own horizontal lane through its barriers to the knot. Resist the urge to share barriers across lanes visually, even when the same control appears twice — repeat the box instead.
- Colour by function, not decoration. A common scheme: blue edge for threats, red edge for consequences, and a green/amber/red status dot on each barrier if you track condition.
- Escalation factors hang below the barrier they defeat, usually dashed, so the main flow stays clean.
Keep the text inside boxes short — "MFA everywhere", not a paragraph. The narrative belongs in the workshop notes, not the diagram.
Drawing it in PowerPoint
PowerPoint is the better of the two office tools for bowties because it is actually a drawing canvas.
- Set the slide to A3 or 16:9 at full size (Design → Slide Size). A real bowtie with five threats and four consequences will not fit legibly on a default slide.
- Build one "barrier" shape first — a rounded rectangle, thin coloured bar on the left edge (use a second thin rectangle, grouped), 11–12 pt text. Copy this everywhere. Consistency of size matters more than any styling choice.
- Place the top event box centre-page, then lay threat boxes in a left column and consequence boxes in a right column.
- Use elbow connectors, not lines. Connect threat → barrier → barrier → top event, and top event → barrier → consequence. Connectors that are glued to shapes survive the inevitable rearranging.
- Align ruthlessly. Select each lane and use Align → Distribute Horizontally. A bowtie communicates through geometry; a wobbly one reads as a sketch.
- Add a legend — what the colours and stars mean — in the bottom corner. Your audience six months from now will not remember.
A 3-threat, 2-consequence bowtie takes an experienced PowerPoint user roughly an hour. Budget half a day for a full workshop-sized one.
Drawing it in Excel
Excel works when you think of the grid as layout scaffolding: merge cell ranges into boxes, colour the borders, and draw connectors with the shape tools on top. Two tips make it bearable:
- Set all columns to the same narrow width (about 2) so merged boxes can be any width you like.
- Freeze a legend row at the top; print with "fit to one page wide".
Excel's real strength is the barrier register next to the picture: a sheet listing every barrier with its owner, type, effectiveness and last verification date. Many teams keep the diagram in PowerPoint and the register in Excel. That split — picture in one file, truth in another — is exactly where the trouble starts.
Where office tools break down
The drawing is the cheap part of a bowtie. The expensive part is everything the drawing is supposed to represent, and that is what PowerPoint cannot hold:
The diagram and the register drift apart. The moment a barrier is renamed in the Excel register but not on the slide — or vice versa — you have two versions of the truth. Audits find these gaps embarrassingly fast.
Nothing degrades. A barrier whose proof test is nine months overdue looks exactly as healthy on the slide as one verified yesterday. A static picture cannot tell you which of your barriers are quietly failing — and that question is the entire point of barrier management.
Incidents don't feed back. When a near miss shows that the "independent high-level alarm" was degraded, someone has to remember to recolour a box on a slide nobody has opened since the workshop. In practice, nobody does.
Version chaos in workshops. Bowtie_FINAL_v7_JS_edits.pptx is a running joke because it is true. Ten people cannot edit one slide at once, so bowtie workshops end with one facilitator transcribing sticky notes for a week.
No roll-up. Five bowties in five files cannot answer "which safety-critical barriers are at risk across the site this Monday?" — the question your leadership team actually asks.
None of this matters for a one-off training slide. All of it matters the day the bowtie becomes part of how you run the operation.
A reasonable progression
- One bowtie, produced once, for communication? PowerPoint is fine. Follow the layout rules above and you will have a professional result.
- A handful of bowties you revisit quarterly? Office tools still work, but appoint one owner per file and put review dates in the calendar — the drift problem is now yours to manage by hand.
- Bowties with named barrier owners, assurance tasks, and incident feedback? You have outgrown drawing tools. This is the point of purpose-built software: SolidBowtie keeps the diagram and the barrier register as one model — owners, health, keep-alive tasks and incident outcomes live on the barriers themselves, and the AI drafts a first version you can edit in a workshop, live, with the whole room in the file at once.
If you want to see what a full bowtie looks like before drawing your own, the worked examples article walks through three — working at height, loss of containment, and ransomware — that you can reproduce in any tool.