Public speaking in Genève: does the committee hear what it does not know?

In Genève, committees in private banking, international organisations, luxury watchmaking and commodity trading bring together specialists who do not hold the same information. The managerial question is precise: how can a presentation be conducted so that facts held by just one person actually enter the assessment of a decision?

What the literature establishes

Garold Stasser and William Titus (1985, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) studied collective decisions in which some information was known to everyone while other information was distributed among participants. In their experiments, discussion favoured shared information at the expense of unshared evidence that could improve the choice. Bringing information holders together therefore does not guarantee that the group will pool what they know.

Mutual recognition favours the familiar

Gwen M. Wittenbaum, Andrea P. Hubbell and Cynthia Zuckerman (1999, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) show that exchanging shared information can encourage positive assessments of one's own competence and that of others. Information that several participants can confirm thus benefits from immediate social validation. For a speaker, this dynamic can make signs of approval misleading: they may accompany recognition of a familiar fact rather than the introduction of decisive evidence.

The premature conclusion

One might conclude that a useful presentation should systematically prioritise new information. These studies do not establish that: information known to only one person may be peripheral, uncertain or wrong. The point is not to reward novelty for its own sake, but to give relevant, as yet unshared evidence an explicit opportunity to be examined. (our executive and employee training programmes)

What these findings do not allow us to promise

These studies concern experimental discussion and decision tasks, not the evaluation of a corporate public-speaking programme. They do not prove that a particular presentation technique improves decisions in Genève's industries. Confidentiality, hierarchy and the ability to verify a claim also constrain what can be shared: information missing from a discussion is not always a facilitation failure.

A practical check in Genève

Within SHR's « Public Speaking & impact » programme, one exercise to test is to ask each participant, before a simulated committee meeting, to record separately a relevant fact they believe only they hold; the facilitator then checks for duplicates and whether the facts may be shared. The speaker presents their analysis, then opens a round dedicated to evidence absent from the presentation, using an anonymised case involving a private-banking investment, resource allocation in an international organisation, a watch launch or a commodity-trading risk. The measure is the proportion of eligible facts initially held by just one person that are explicitly examined before the decision, established from the initial records and a discussion log. Comparison with a simulation without this dedicated round, alternating the order and cases between groups, allows information exchange to be tested without conflating it with the quality of the eventual choice. To go further: explore the Public Speaking & Impact training in Geneva in the canton of Geneva, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.

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