Proposal Land

Better RFP Responses & Management
 
Proposal Land

Structural Plasticity

 

Have you heard about brain/neuroplasticity?

There are two types of neuroplasticity, including:

    • Functional plasticity: The brain’s ability to move functions from a damaged area of the brain to other undamaged areas
    • Structural plasticity: The brain’s ability to actually change its physical structure as a result of learning
      – Very Well Mind: How Experience Changes the Brain

So this plasticity/malleability is a good/bad news thing.

It seems our brains do learn from making mistakes:
They learn how to make them.
– Big Think (longer extract below)

Oops. I hate it when that happens.

Habits can be good or bad. That’s something to consider with respect to our proposal processes. If we’re not getting what we want, if we can clearly see that we’re making the same mistake again and again . . .

  • Bidding on projects that are too big for us
  • Over-complying and over-pricing
  • Failing to set and enforce quality and style standards
  • Implementing late-to-need editorial reviews
  • Scheduling our Red Team too late in the process
  • Making the costing completely obscure
  • Scrambling like crazy at the last minute

. . . then we should stop. And then we should deliberately do something different, over-riding our ingrained habits. We should change our team structure or our processes (or both). We should learn how not to make that mistake.

I used to tell teams that my aim was to fall into better-quality holes each time. Hahaha. But the neuroscience says it’s not quite as silly as it sounds.

 

It has to do with neural pathways that get created as we do things. When we do something right, a pathway is created. Unfortunately, a pathway is also created when we something wrong. We basically build habits this way, both good and bad. So the reason we keep making the same mistakes is that we slip by default back into existing neural pathways.

It’s the same phenomenon that means you can only get somewhere by getting lost the same way you did last time, or that you keep putting things down in the same spot until they seem to be lost when in fact they’re just underneath the most recent thing you put down.

More significantly, this happens with bigger screwups, like being attracted to the wrong kind of person or other misguided decisions you habitually make. It seems our brains do learn from making mistakes: They learn how to make them.

Big Think

 

 

Term: Rated Criteria, Rated Evaluation Criteria

 

Evaluation criteria that the client will assess by assigning points; that is, not usually mandatory requirements, which are assessed on a pass/fail basis.

However, may be combined with a mandatory requirement to meet a minimum threshold (for example, 70 percent on a criterion or averaged across a group of criteria), so not as innocuous as they might look.

On a side note, one of the funnier typos I ever saw in an RFP was about how the company would meet the “hated criteria.” Perhaps a Freudian slip . . .

The 12 Days of Christmas

 

I remember my surprise when I learned that the 12 days start on Christmas Day (or, maybe, Boxing Day) and run to the day before Epiphany. It’s called the Christmas Twelvetide, which is delightful jargon, no?

I’ve done regular-world remakes of this classic for the last three years: 2017, 2018 and 2019. Like Christmas, 2020’s version is coming.

This year, I decided to try a Proposal Land version. All photos are used with the permission of the subject, their parent, or both (as applicable).

Merry Christmas. I hope you’re not working through it.

Silly but True

  2

I never understood why there was so much jockeying for completely irrelevant position when companies came together to respond to an RFP.

I’m thrilled to see the first Pfizer vaccine being administered in Ontario.
It’s time to put an end to the COVID-19 pandemic.
– Tweet by Doug Ford, Premier of Ontario
(for American readers, a premier is akin to a governor)

I mean, I understood the effort to grab work: Work meant revenue. But other activities seemed senseless, like the effort each company put into having the name of their company come first in proposal text, when all were listed.

Nova Scotia receives first doses of Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine
– Headline in Halifax Today

“Why not just go with the alphabetical order?” I wondered.

Reassuring Data for Pfizer’s COVID-19 Vaccine
– Title for article on the McGill University,
Office for Science and Society website

I mean, who cares? Pick an order and enforce it consistently. That’s it, right?

Watch as the first person in BC receives Pfizer’s COVID vaccine.
– News feed from CTV

Well, maybe not. Although most official sites use the whole name — the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine — most commentators and the general public abbreviate that to Pfizer.

If BioNTech had gotten their name first, this would now be its vaccine.

Think about that the next time you’re tempted to do the sensible or cooperative thing and give up that “pole position” for no corresponding benefit. As silly as it seems, and especially in our abbreviation-happy culture, being first can matter.

 

Term: Proposal Team

 

The group of people assigned to produce a proposal in response to a specific RFP.

Always overworked; often overwhelmed; frequently underappreciated.

Structure and make-up varies dramatically with the scope/scale of the RFP.  (See chapter 3 of my manual for more on how proposal teams are configured to tackle the 33 tasks involved.)