Page 140 - Writing Winning Business Proposals

Green Team Reviews 131

the reasons why our work is so fascinating. Nothing is black or white, only vary-
ing shades of gray.
“In a word, our secret is collaboration. We put collaboration into practice
for your benefit, and, of course, our own. We have developed a process, a tech-
nique, for working jointly to get many of our best minds (even those not directly
involved in the proposal effort for your organization) involved to help us review
and improve our selling efforts to you.”
During the rest of our conversation, I learned that the partner’s firm does con-
siderable business with the U.S. government, including the U.S. Army, which
uses a technique called a Red Team Review when it considers whether to invest in
new matériel/weapons systems.
The premise of a Red Team Review is this:

Before submitting a proposal, you increase your odds of winning if you deter-
mine your strengths and weaknesses and then identify and implement actions
to leverage the former and eliminate the latter.

The consultant’s firm borrowed and modified the red team concept and
applied it to its own business-development efforts, but it changed the color to
green to accord with one of Edward deBono’s colored hats. 1
According to deBono, developer of numerous creative-thinking methods, dif-
ferent colored hats can be used to signify different styles of thinking. By focusing
on one aspect of thinking at a time, you reduce confusion in your mind among
multiple objectives. In his book Six Thinking Hats (Back Bay Books, 1992), deBono
suggests that you and your team choose one of the six colored hats to wear at a
particular moment. You figuratively put on a different hat, a different framework
for thinking, and then everyone plays the role defined by that hat. In this way,
individual egos are protected because everyone is wearing the same color hat. The
hats allow you to think and say things that you might not otherwise think and say.
They are a liberating device.
In deBono’s model, the green hat represents new ideas, new concepts, new
perceptions. It encourages the deliberate creation of new ideas, alternatives, and
more alternatives. In essence, it seeks to identify new approaches to a situation.
Green is deBono’s color for this hat because “green is the color of fertility and
growth and plants that grow from tiny seeds.” Green is the symbolic color for
the thinking hat specifically concerned with creativity, new ideas, and new ways
of looking at things, escaping from the old ideas in order to find better ones.
DeBono suggests why green-hat thinking is so difficult, for me as a client as well
as for you: