In Basel, when should you present your recommendation to the committee?
In Basel's pharmaceutical, life sciences and Rhine logistics committees, a presentation often brings together people who hold different information. The managerial question is specific: should speakers announce their recommendation at the outset, or first gather the information held separately by participants?
What the literature establishes
Garold Stasser and William Titus (1985, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) studied group decisions in which some information was known to everyone and other information was distributed among participants. Discussions favoured shared information over individually held information that could have changed the choice. Bringing together people with complementary information therefore does not guarantee that this information will enter the discussion.
A mechanism that favours what is already known
Garold Stasser and William Titus (1987, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) examined how information load and the proportion of shared information affected the dissemination of unshared information. Their findings show that pooling information depends on the structure of the available information, not simply on the opportunity to speak. An item known to several participants has more routes into the discussion than one held by a single person.
The premature conclusion
One might conclude that speakers should always save their recommendation until the end. These studies, however, do not directly compare two presentation sequences in an executive committee. The useful distinction is narrower: stating a position is not equivalent to having elicited the information needed to assess it. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What the evidence cannot promise
These experiments use controlled tasks and deliberately distributed information; they reproduce neither pharmaceutical regulatory responsibilities nor the interdependencies of international R&D. In practice, information missing from a discussion may also be confidential, poorly substantiated or considered outside its scope. The number of contributions and the final agreement therefore cannot establish whether the committee considered the decisive information.
A practical check in Basel
In an SHR « Public Speaking & impact » workshop in Basel, a team could test two versions of a presentation using the same simulated case linking pharmaceutical production, life sciences, Rhine transport and international R&D: recommendation first, or collection of function-specific information before the recommendation. Separate groups would receive the same briefing, with relevant items distributed individually and identified in advance on an observation checklist. The measure would be the proportion of those items actually mentioned before the decision, checked against an authorised recording or an observation log. This local test would examine the speaking format without treating improved information exchange as proof of a better decision. To go further: explore the Public Speaking & Impact training in Basel in the canton of Basel-Stadt, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
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