Proposal Land

Better RFP Responses & Management
 
Proposal Land

A New Year’s Habit

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For many people, work consists of a series of urgencies.
Set them up and knock them down.
Empty the in-box, answer the boss, make the deadline.
– Seth’s Blog, 2020 Dec 30

Make the deadline?!? Please don’t remind me. I’m taking a break from proposals.

Most of us are so stuck on the short-cycles of urgency
that it’s difficult to even imagine changing our longer-term systems.

If you happen to be outside a short cycle of urgency at this very moment, then consider taking Seth’s advice to fix your proposal systems:

  • Identify the kinds of work you never win or never make enough money on, and exclude them from future consideration. No exceptions.
  • Make it a requirement to get early executive review of your plan, so you have time to adjust course if necessary.
  • Train newbies in the ways of proposals. Before they start.
  • Persuade executives to expect a clear and comprehensive project-risk assessment by presenting one. Once. (They’re fast learners.)
  • Require costers to “show their work” so the next poor schmo through the mill can benefit from it.

And so on. They’re your urgencies: You know what needs to be fixed.

None of this works if you do it temporarily.
Resolutions don’t work. Habits and systems can.

 

Make a Note

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Now. Today. Before you get busy. Before you forget.

Make a note about every pandemic protocol you instituted and when, especially if it was before the general call to do so. Directing and facilitating work-from-home. Reconfiguring your premises for employee and customer safety.

Make a note about every business challenge you’ve surmounted during this pandemic year and how. New products. New services. New modes of delivery. New supports for clients that are struggling.

Make a note about every employee-support program or initiative you’ve implemented. Time off. Family supports. Access to confidential counselling. Regular round-table discussions.

Make a note about every community-support activity your company and employees participated in. Christmas toys for kids. Snowsuits for kids. Donations for your local Food Bank. Meals for seniors. Cupcakes delivered to staff at long-term-care homes.

Make a note about any feedback from employees, their families, and your community. Thank-you letters. Public kudos. News stories.

Make a note to celebrate all this, when the time(s) is/are right.

Make a note to add these tidbits to the stories you sprinkle through proposals. The stories that describe what kind of company you are. What kind of employees you have. The stories that show what you do, not just what you say.

Make a note. Now. Today. Before you get busy. Before you forget.

 

Here’s one story that’s been well documented: Canadian North and Scotiabank partnering to deliver 75 sets of brand new hockey gear to Inuvik, Kugaaruk and Qikiqtarjuaq. You don’t have to make this much effort: Any record is worthwhile.

Here’s another (amazing) story about an Ottawa philanthropist. Again, it’s not about matching the effort or the profile, it’s about tracking what you did do.

Term: PPP

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Public-private partnership; acronym pronounced by spelling it out.

Update: Also now called P3. Because we need the time saved by eliminating one syllable for something important.

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