Approving a distant project: what its appeal does not tell us about feasibility
Executive committees regularly approve projects whose operational constraints will only become tangible later. The useful question is not whether to favour the present or the future, but whether the same project is assessed using the same criteria as execution draws closer.
What the literature establishes
Nira Liberman and Yaacov Trope (1998, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) showed in their experiments that the desirability of an action carries more weight in decisions concerning the distant future, whereas feasibility carries more weight when implementation is near. The distinction concerns the value of the intended outcome and the ease or difficulty of the means required to achieve it. It suggests that a timeline does more than locate a decision in time: it can also change the weighting of its criteria.
The mechanism: from why to how
Yaacov Trope and Nira Liberman (2010, Psychological Review) present an overview of construal-level theory: psychological distance favours more abstract representations, focused on general characteristics and purposes. Proximity favours more concrete, contextualised representations. Applied cautiously to management, this mechanism suggests that a strategic ambition and its practical implementation may not receive equal attention at the approval stage.
The premature conclusion
One might conclude that leaders should always be brought back to operational details. That would confuse abstraction with error: a general representation also makes it possible to compare projects by their purpose, without allowing a secondary difficulty to dictate the choice. The point is not to replace why with how, but to make their respective weight explicit before committing. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What the evidence does not establish
The experiments cited do not demonstrate that executive committees systematically approve too many distant projects, or that more detailed analysis always improves their decisions. In an organisation, budgets, regulatory requirements or team availability may genuinely change as execution approaches. A revision justified by new information must therefore be distinguished from a change in the weighting of the same information.
A practical check in Zurich
As part of SHR’s decision-making programme, an exercise applicable to financial services, insurance, tech and the European headquarters of international groups in Zurich is to document a project’s expected benefits and feasibility conditions when it is approved. At the review preceding execution, revisit exactly the same assessment grid and record the new information supporting each change in assessment. The proposed measure is the proportion of criteria whose assessment changes without documented new information: this is not proof of bias, but a verifiable signal for examining whether the time horizon has shifted priorities. To go further: explore the Decision-making training in Zurich, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
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