| Avoid Logic in Your Proposals |
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| Proposal Development |
| Written by Matt Handal |
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This sounds like crazy advice. You and your technical team will often want to write proposals that are logical. You want your proposals to "make sense." Right? Not really. The truth about proposals is that mirroring the RFP submission requirements and rating criteria is always a better approach than writing something that is "logical." Let me give you an example. Let's say you are picking up your sweetheart for a date. His/her father comes down to greet you and says, " Here is what I want to know: what time are you bringing my child home, where are you going, how are you going to get there, and how can I reach you?" It might be logical to answer like this, "We'll be driving my car to Jimmy's birthday party at the roller rink, the phone number at the rink is 555-RINK, and we will be back here by 10pm." But in the proposal world, that's a rookie mistake. You need to mirror the request exactly. The reason for this is two-fold. First, the initial review of your proposal is often done by someone who is not a decision maker. Their job is to weed out the proposals that are "not responsive" or do not meet the proposal criteria set out. Second, proposals are usually judged by a committee using specific grading criteria. It’s the proposal writer's job to make it as easy as possible to rate your proposal. Using logic often makes it harder, not easier to grade a proposal.
Comments (4)
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I'm glad you liked the article. Thanks for the kind words!
Wow. That is the most amazing comment I have ever seen (especially on this site). I commend you!
My initial thought is you must be an engineer! That is meant as a complement.
Now I’m going to tell you something you are not going to like. You should write the majority of your proposal at an 8th grade reading level. 99% of what I write is at the 8th grade level or below. For example, the article you are commenting on ...7th grade reading level!
I refer to it as “spoon feeding.” You don’t want to lead the reader to conclusions. Instead, you want to expressly state the conclusions and provide the facts your conclusions are based on. Unfortunately, you can’t assume the reader will make the connections or conclusions that you wish them to make. In fact, you can’t even assume they will do more than skim your proposal.
With that said, in the technical approach, you want to speak to the level of understanding that your audience has. But you still need to be clear, concise, and correct. You want to give the reader a “warm and fuzzy” feeling that you know what you are taking about.
Even technical documents like standard specifications have moved towards using the active voice and imperative mood. Today’s technical specifications need to be clear, concise, complete, and correct. They explicitly state what the contractor should do. They leave no room for interpretation.
My advice is to spoon-feed your proposals. Leave no room for interpretation. Sorry for the Halloween scare!
Thanks again for commenting and joining in on the conversation.
(Reading level 6.9)
By example I refer to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 A Space Odyssey, whereby man eventually evolves to the point that he loses his sense of being and is controlled by a massive computer brain “Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer" or HAL 9000 for short. Let me point out that Heuristic and Algorithmic are both processes of thought.
HAL is capable of speech recognition, natural language understanding, lip reading, and thinking well enough to beat humans at chess. Man has been relegated to the status of care taker.
Along with all of HAL’s capabilities comes the capacity for malevolence. HAL kills its astronaut crew. The audience is left wondering whether HAL is right, wrong, evil, or mad. An astronaut decides to shut down HAL 9000's higher cognitive functions, an experience equivalent to death for HAL. HAL's central core is depicted as a room full of brightly lit computer modules mounted in arrays from which they can be inserted or removed. As the astronaut removes the modules, HAL's intelligence degrades.
HAL has had a lasting effect not only on fiction, but also on the real world. It has inspired astronauts, scientists and philosophers. Scientists ask how its capabilities can be duplicated and philosophers have asked whether HAL was responsible for the murders of the astronauts. All of us ask whether we want to create intelligent machines that may someday endanger us.
In the world consulting engineers, our job is to provide the clients with real world solutions to their current need. To prove that we have the experience, knowledge and capacity to provide that solution, we put forward our Statement of Qualifications (SOQ), which is in answer to the client’s specific request. However, as Mr. Handal correctly points out, the initial viewing of our SOQ is not by a qualified engineer or someone that understands the need scenario. The initial review is by a clerk who sits down with a checklist to make sure that the SOQ conforms to the format, order and specifications. In other words, a check list of acceptance.
What I find SCARY is the fact that once your SOQ is passed along to the review committee, Mr. Handal writes that it is the “writer's job to make it as easy as possible to rate your proposal.”
Come on, who is reviewing these SOQ’s. Do they not have the ability to think? Do we follow the newspaper industry and write our SOQ’s for a seventh grade level (it was ninth grade level until the year 2000 when they lowered the standard), reader to allow them to follow along?
Has our use of computers caused us to lose our use of logic and ability to comprehend? Are we on the verge of giving ourselves to HAL?
I like article. This opinion coming from someone who took logic twice in college.