Public speaking in Fribourg: should the message reflect the decision horizon?
A presentation can explain a project clearly while leaving a committee unsure about what it must decide today. The management question is specific: should purpose and implementation conditions receive the same emphasis when seeking agreement in principle as when requesting an imminent commitment?
What the literature establishes
Yaacov Trope and Nira Liberman (2010, Psychological Review) offer a theoretical and empirical review: greater psychological distance tends to favour abstract representations, whereas proximity favours concrete representations. A distant project may therefore be considered more in terms of its purpose, and a nearby project in terms of its implementation. This is not a distinction between strategic and operational audiences, but a possible variation in how the same situation is represented.
Why timing can shift the criteria
Nira Liberman and Yaacov Trope (1998, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) show experimentally that desirability and feasibility carry different weights depending on a decision’s temporal distance. In the situations studied, desirability receives greater weight in the distant future, while feasibility receives greater weight in the near future. For public speaking, this suggests a hypothesis to test: a presentation centred on a project’s appeal may leave unanswered the criteria that become important when a commitment is required.
The hasty conclusion
One might conclude that vision belongs to the long term and detail to the short term. Yet these studies justify neither removing constraints from a strategic presentation nor stripping an immediate decision of its purpose. A reasonable adjustment concerns the emphasis and sequence of arguments, not the removal of information needed for the decision. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What the evidence cannot promise
These publications do not constitute a trial of public-speaking training with committees in Fribourg. They do not establish that adapting a speech to the time horizon automatically improves collective decision quality. Expertise, responsibilities and actual constraints may also explain why some listeners request concrete implementation details, even for a distant project.
A practical check in Fribourg
Within SHR’s “Public Speaking & impact” programme, an exercise to test in Fribourg would involve presenting a collaborative project linking an agri-food company, a bilingual industrial partner and a university team, while specifying whether the request is for agreement in principle or permission to launch a pilot. For each horizon, divide participants between two presentations of equal length, containing the same facts and available in French and German: one opens with expected benefits, the other with implementation conditions. Before the group discussion, ask each participant to write down the decision requested, the main benefit and one necessary launch condition, then calculate the proportion of answers matching a scoring guide prepared in advance. Comparing results by horizon and language would help check whether argument order improves understanding of the decision, rather than treating audience approval as proof of impact. To go further: explore the Public Speaking & Impact training in Fribourg in the canton of Fribourg, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
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