Public speaking in Zurich: explain a project before defending it
In Zurich’s financial services, insurance and tech sectors, and at the European headquarters of international groups, presentations often serve to secure project approval. The managerial question is specific: does asking speakers to explain the expected mechanism, rather than only the reasons for approval, help put their recommendation to a more meaningful test?
What the literature establishes
Leonid Rozenblit and Frank Keil (2002, Cognitive Science) show that people can overestimate the depth of their understanding of how familiar systems work. When asked to provide a detailed explanation, they lower their assessment of that understanding. For public speaking, these findings suggest distinguishing familiarity with a project from the ability to explain its causal relationships.
Explaining a mechanism is not the same as giving reasons
Philip M. Fernbach, Todd Rogers, Craig R. Fox and Steven A. Sloman (2013, Psychological Science) examined this distinction in relation to political proposals. Asking people to explain how these would work reduced perceived understanding and moderated their expressed positions, unlike asking for reasons supporting those positions. Defending a preference and describing how a measure would produce its effects are therefore different exercises.
The hasty conclusion
It would be tempting to conclude that a good speaker should make every recommendation less assertive. Yet these studies show neither that moderation guarantees a better decision nor that strong conviction is necessarily poorly founded. The issue is instead to check whether the confidence expressed rests on an explainable mechanism whose assumptions can be discussed. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What the evidence does not allow us to promise
The studies cited concern understanding systems and political proposals, not project approval in Zurich-based companies. They do not demonstrate that a mechanism-focused presentation improves investment performance or risk management. A detailed explanation can also be wrong: making it explicit facilitates scrutiny without replacing the evidence needed to validate it.
A practical check in Zurich
Within SHR’s “Public Speaking & impact” programme, an exercise to test with these Zurich teams is to record a project presentation, followed by a second version explaining the chain between the proposed action and the expected outcome. Using anonymised transcripts presented in random order, subject-matter reviewers identify the stated causal links and calculate the proportion supported by evidence or explicitly labelled as assumptions to be tested. An improvement in this indicator would show that the reasoning has been made more explicit, not yet that the decision is better. To go further: explore the Public Speaking & Impact training in Zurich in the canton of Zurich, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
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