Pre-mortems in the bidding world

It’s a mixture of an assessment, an exercise and an analysis of what might go wrong with a bid. A pre-mortem is an opportunity to think about the reasons we will fail — whether that’s on a bid, across a capability, or a company. Project teams have been using pre-mortem exercises since Gary Klein started doing them in 1998.

Research by Mitchell, Russo, and Pennington, found that prospective hindsight — imagining that an event has already occurred, and the groundwork of a pre-mortem — increases the ability to correctly identify reasons for future outcomes by 30%.

So change the question: don’t ask what could go wrong, ask what did go wrong.

Overall, this kind of certainty led to 30% more reasons and twice as many action-based reasons than abstract reasons. Making the failure concrete rather than abstract alters how the mind thinks about the problem.

What can we do right now at the beginning of the new bid to avoid the ‘if only’?

We normally have a win strategy session. In fact, if you listen to the bidding industry this is the one event to rule them all. I was very good at winning strategies as an EMEA facilitator for a big tech services company and we did not necessarily win all the bids. It’s not a silver bullet.

The win strategy is totally focused on how we can beat the competition and win. What about the reasons we could lose that are not about the customer or the competition? What about the bid itself? Gabriele Oettingen’s psychology lab at New York University has shown that visualising our aims as already achieved can backfire. The positive imagery can be inspiring at first but it also tricks the mind into relaxing, as if the hard work is done. This means the more compelling the mental scene of success, the more likely it is that your energy will seep away. We ignore the risks.

Optimism bias comes in too because we are humans, and we end the session ready to crack the champagne. “No negativity is allowed here — we’re going to win!” How can we counter that?

Think about risk management. What do people who have to be good at risk management do? The people that run nuclear power plants, air traffic control systems, and aircraft carriers, among others, are known as High Reliability Organisations, or HROs. An HRO is an organisation that has succeeded in avoiding catastrophes despite a high level of risk and complexity.

HROs have been studied by researchers Karl Weick and Kathleen Sutcliffe. They found that successful HROs have:

• Preoccupation with failure. Do not ignore the small process failures, deal with them immediately. Be open to looking for failure.
• Reluctance to simplify. Complex problems get complex solutions. Embrace the complexity. Leaders are willing to challenge long-held beliefs.
• Sensitivity to operations. Every voice matters and the best picture of reality comes from the front line.
• Resilience. Committed to it. Recovery is swift and you innovate solutions in a dynamic environment.
• Expertise. Always deference to expertise. Trust them. Value expertise over authority.

We need a new way of bidding for complex opportunities. If you can be more HRO and anticipate failure, you could be in with a better chance of winning.