Public speaking in Vevey: set the criteria before advocating a project?
At group headquarters and SMEs across the Riviera, advocating a project often involves trade-offs between cost, quality and feasibility. The management question is specific: should evaluation criteria be made explicit before the recommended solution is presented?
What the literature establishes
Eric Luis Uhlmann and Geoffrey L. Cohen (2005, Psychological Science) showed in candidate-selection experiments that participants could redefine the qualities required for a job to favour a candidate on the basis of gender. In one of their experiments, committing to criteria before learning the candidates' gender eliminated the discrimination observed in that setting. The finding concerns recruitment, but it reveals a problem relevant to presentations: assessment criteria are not necessarily independent of the person being assessed.
The mechanism: justifying a preference
Ziva Kunda (1990, Psychological Bulletin), in a review of motivated reasoning, explains how the desire to reach a particular conclusion can guide the search for and evaluation of arguments. This tendency remains constrained by the ability to construct an apparently reasonable justification. During a presentation, a committee might therefore favour speed, robustness or cost according to what makes its preference defensible; this is a plausible application of the mechanism, not a finding directly tested in these studies.
The premature conclusion
One might conclude that an evaluation framework should be fixed before anyone speaks. That would confuse preventing opportunistic justification with preventing learning: a presentation may reveal a constraint that genuinely warrants revising the criteria. The useful distinction is between a change prompted by new information and one intended to preserve a preference. (our executive and employee training programmes)
The limits of the evidence and of current practice
These studies do not demonstrate that a pre-established framework improves investment decisions at a group headquarters or an SME. The recruitment experiments concern a particular setting, while the review of motivated reasoning is not a trial of public-speaking training. A written framework can also create an appearance of rigour without preventing selective interpretation of certain criteria.
A practical check in Vevey
In a SHR « Public Speaking & impact » workshop in Vevey, participants could work on a packaging project for a global food business or a Riviera SME: before the presentation, the committee records its criteria and their order of priority. After the presentation, it revisits the list and documents each change, identifying the new information that justifies it. The measure is the proportion of added, removed or reprioritised criteria for which a specific justification is recorded, retaining both versions of the framework. This indicator checks the traceability of the assessment, not the ultimate quality of the decision. To go further: explore the Public Speaking & Impact training in Vevey in the canton of Vaud, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: Public Speaking & Impact in Vevey
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