Public speaking in Lausanne: how should a presentation end to help people act?
In a medtech company, a higher education institution or an international sports organisation, a presentation often ends with a request for follow-up. The management question is specific: should speakers finish by restating the objective, or invite each relevant audience member to define when and how they will act?
What the literature establishes
Peter M. Gollwitzer and Veronika Brandstätter (1997, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) distinguish the intention to achieve a goal from planning the circumstances in which to act on it. Their studies show that specifying when and where to act can help people carry out an intention. They examine goal pursuit, not the effectiveness of conclusions to professional presentations.
The mechanism: linking a situation to a response
Peter M. Gollwitzer (1999, American Psychologist) explains the mechanism of implementation intentions: linking an identifiable situation to a specific response in the form “if this situation arises, then I will do this”. The plan aims to make the initiation of action less dependent on fresh deliberation at the relevant moment. For public speaking, this suggests distinguishing the general recommendation from the concrete occasion on which it could be implemented.
The premature conclusion
It would be tempting to conclude that a good presentation must always end with an individual commitment. That would confuse support for execution with a method for securing agreement: a plan replaces neither an accepted goal nor the means to act. When a committee still needs to assess a proposal, the appropriate next step may be a check to perform rather than a decision to implement. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What these studies do not allow us to promise
These articles do not directly compare different ways of concluding a pitch to investors, researchers or sports executives. Applying them to public speaking is therefore a practical hypothesis, not an effect demonstrated in these settings. Reported follow-through must also be distinguished from completed follow-through: collecting commitments in the room is not enough to measure impact.
A practical check in Lausanne
Within SHR’s “Public Speaking & impact” programme, an exercise to test in Lausanne is to prepare two endings for the same presentation, one simply restating the objective and the other inviting audience members to write down their next action and its triggering situation. For teams from medtech, higher education, international sport or Lake Geneva-region scale-ups, randomly assign comparable groups to these versions, keeping the request and resources identical. At a deadline set before the exercise, compare the proportion of actions actually completed among the people asked to act, using an agreed record such as a document submitted or a meeting held. This protocol evaluates a local adaptation; it does not assume that the ending that seems most motivating will be the most effective. To go further: explore the Public Speaking & Impact training in Lausanne in the canton of Vaud, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
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