Page 141 - Writing Winning Business Proposals

132 Writing Winning Business Proposals

For most people . . . creative thinking is difficult because it is contrary to the
natural habits of recognition, judgment and criticism. . . . The brain is designed
to set up patterns, to use them and to condemn anything that does not “fit”
these patterns. Most thinkers like to be secure. They like to be right.
Creativity involves provocation, exploration and risk taking. . . . You cannot
order yourself (or others) to have a new idea, but you can order yourself (and
others) to spend time trying to have a new idea. The green hat provides a for-
mal way of doing this.

So the consultant’s firm structured a Green Team Review process, a tech-
nique to analyze its selling strategy and proposal-development efforts before
submitting final proposals. In so doing, it purposefully takes off another of the
six colored hats, the black hat. The black hat is specifically concerned with neg-
ative assessment, with criticism, with what is incorrect and will not work, with
risks and dangers. This hat is the one that most consultants are paid to wear
when they conduct projects for clients, when they identify problems and solve
them. While black-hat thinking plays an important and often crucial role in
problem solving and decision making, this negative orientation is not appropri-
ate all the time.
Therefore, before a proposal is submitted, while there is still time to modify
the offering (or improve personal relationships with the potential client), green-
hat thinking can offer new information, new possibilities, constructive ideas to
build on. Subsequently, all the logical, legitimate, critically important negative
aspects of a situation can be considered with black-hat thinking.
Many consultancies have adopted the Red Team Review technique, which
traditionally occurs after the document has been assembled. Those who have
written the proposal, as well as many who have not been involved in the busi-
ness-development process, gather to examine the document, often ripping it
apart and suggesting dozens if not hundreds of changes. Imagine that you had
managed the proposal-development effort and were involved in the Red Team
Review, listening for four hours or sometimes longer than a day as hundreds of
revisions were being recommended. After hours of such discussion, you would
feel that each new recommended revision was unbearable, knowing that the pro-
posal would have to be almost entirely rewritten (and submitted in less than a
few days).
In the rest of this chapter, I will show you a different process, one that can
occur at any time during the business-development process, even (in a proactive
lead) before you have had your first meeting with me. Instead of taking hours,
this process takes minutes (40 minutes to be exact).