Page 142 - Writing Winning Business Proposals

Green Team Reviews 133

The Strategic Premise of Green Team Collaboration

The Green Team process is specifically designed to change participants’ behaviors
from black-hat thinking to green-hat thinking, from “what won’t work” to “what
may be possible.” In facilitating this change, the process attempts to expand the
proposal team’s knowledge, moving beyond what it currently knows so that it
also learns what it doesn’t know and discovers what its firm knows, and beyond.
(See Figure 8.1.)
Figure 8.1 displays these four levels of knowledge. Most people write proposals
based only on what they know, and many times they are successful. They work
from a base of knowledge represented by the smallest circle in the Figure 8.1.
They have interacted with me and others in my organization, have tried to work
smart, and “know what they know.” Based on what they know, they prepare the
best proposal they can.
Unfortunately, they sometimes lose because of what they don’t know, because
of the many red flags used in the work sessions of this book that represent a lack
of information, risks, and vulnerabilities. They don’t try to determine what their
proposal team doesn’t know. Quite often a proposal team, like a sports team, is

Know
What We
Know
(1)
(2)
(3)

(1) Know What We Don’t Know
(2) Know What the Firm Knows
(3) All There Is to Know

FIGURE 8.1 The strategic premise of the Green Team Review: expanding your team’s base of
FI GU RE 8. 1 T he stra t egic pr emise of the Gr een T eam Review : expanding y our t eam ’ s base o f
knowledge
knowledge