Proposal Land

Bring the outside, inside.
Rhys Newman and Luke Johnson

How People get Disconnected from the Outdoors

Proposal team workspace tends to be temporary, no frills, cheap.  In this speed-and-feed, cost-control-uber-alles environment, ergonomics gets little attention and any window is quickly plastered over with flipchart paper, the better to prevent industrial espionage.

With the long hours typical of proposals, people can go a long time without spending any appreciable time outside.  I went into one proposal den in the depths of winter and didn’t come out until the summer.  (That’s not literally true, of course — I trudged back to my hotel every night after dark, after all — but it’s true to my experience.)

The Consequences of this Disconnection

There’s just one thing.  It’s not good for people.

It’s not good for their physical health, it’s not good for their mental health, and it’s not good for what we might call their professional health:

• Their productivity
• Their capacity for innovation
• Their ability to analyze and synthesize data and to see connections
• Their frequency of  “Aha!” moments
• Their willingness to work with other people, overlooking their quirks
• Their ability to control their own quirkiness

The Remedy

What to do?  It turns out this is one of the easier ones:

• Unblock a window.
• Meet when possible in an open area where people can at least see outside.
• Bring in flowers (or non-allergenic plants if pollen and scent are problems).
• Start a photo contest and post pictures of the world beyond your proposal room doors.
• Display colourful or interesting leaves and rocks that people bring in.

And where you have the option, actually get outdoors through the workday, too:

• Model a protocol of getting outside at lunch, every day, rain or shine, sleet or snow.
• Encourage walking meetings – outside.

 

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 Proposals are schedule-driven projects that require a strict project management discipline. Right? Partly right. In proposal terminology, I’d call that answer incomplete.  Proposals are projects, for sure, but they’re also the output of teamwork. I’ve recently been learning how much the design business has in common with proposals.

This post is one of a series on proposal teamwork, inspired by a fabulous article on Medium on design teams:
“No Dickheads! A Guide to Building Happy, Healthy, and Creative Teams.”

Hire a bookie.
(Betting on shit seems to be galvanizing and brings a team together.)
Rhys Newman and Luke Johnson

As someone who used to play poker with a cheat sheet — you know, this one . . .

. . . I might be less than a credible source for this rule.  But betting is akin, I think, to other silly games that proposal teams play, taking their fun where they can find it.

Betting: Analogous to Humour?

One form of humour is “something dangerous from a safe source” – just ask any 6-month old, giggling while being lofted into the air by a parent.

Maybe betting  is analogous: something dangerous (competition) in a safe environment (insignificant amounts, unimportant outcomes).

How Does it Work?

By building trust?  By fostering a sense of common purpose?  Hey, what am I?  A psychologist?  Knowing why it works is less important than knowing that it does.

How to Execute?

So what would proposal teams bet on, in this day of Google access?  Pretty much anything, as long as it isn’t look-uppable and doesn’t really matter.

Future sporting events (their outcomes, interim scores, number of goals/points)?  Of course. The total lunch bill for a group, or the last number in it?  Why not?

But proposal teams also have some task-related things they can bet on:

• The number of questions that the RFP will provoke
• The number of RFP amendments the client will issue
• Whether there will be an extension and how long it will be

Anything that transforms the activity into a game is worth considering.

Still Skeptical?

Not buying it?  Maybe you’d like to lay a small wager.  What odds are you prepared to give me that this doesn’t work for your proposal team?

 

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 Proposals are schedule-driven projects that require a strict project management discipline. Right? Partly right. In proposal terminology, I’d call that answer incomplete.  Proposals are projects, for sure, but they’re also the output of teamwork. I’ve recently been learning how much the design business has in common with proposals.

This post is one of a series on proposal teamwork, inspired by a fabulous article on Medium on design teams:
“No Dickheads! A Guide to Building Happy, Healthy, and Creative Teams.”

Invert everything. (See the world through the client’s/user’s eyes.)
Rhys Newman and Luke Johnson

Seeing the world, or, at least, our service or product through the client’s/user’s eyes is obviously good for design, helping us give them what they want, not what we think they need.  That applies to proposal teams, too, which are (whether they realize it or not) designing a solution for the client and the eventual users.

But why is it good for proposal teamwork?

General Rules of Teamwork

Most teams go through standard stages, neatly if somewhat cutely named as follows:

• Forming – coming together
• Storming – fighting for power and over differences of opinion, style, and values
• Norming – agreeing, at least implicitly, on how the team will function
• Performing – doing the work assigned

How It Works on Proposal Teams

Limited by the hard deadline, proposal teams must go straight from forming to performing – but conflict doesn’t disappear magically just because the team is on the clock.  Instead, it emerges in other ways:

• Interpersonal conflicts, as unacknowledged issues fuel snippiness
• Professional conflicts, as undoubted experts dig in their heels on their approach/solution

How It Can Work Better

An external focus – trying to see our proposed solution through the client’s/user’s eyes – fosters proposal teamwork in two ways:

• By fostering an overarching us/them mentality, increasing team cohesion and derailing the natural impulse to splinter into small, like-minded, and ultimately ineffective sub-groups
• By establishing an objective and blessedly impersonal norm for resolving disagreements; to wit, “How would the client/user see this?”

 

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Proposals are schedule-driven projects that require a strict project management discipline. Right? Partly right. In proposal terminology, I’d call that answer incomplete.  Proposals are projects, for sure, but they’re also the output of teamwork. I’ve recently been learning how much the design business has in common with proposals.

This post is one of a series on proposal teamwork, inspired by a fabulous article on Medium on design teams:
“No Dickheads! A Guide to Building Happy, Healthy, and Creative Teams.”