The Death of Thinking

What the Heck Is Happening?

Increasingly, I am seeing business developers, capture managers, and the many others involved with winning a competitive government contracting (GovCon) pursuit doing their job without any thought. They follow their company’s internal business development lifecycle processes (if they even have one) like drones believing that if they use this checklist; complete that template; or complete their slide deck for their company’s periodic business review or gate review that they are on the path to a win.?This is the farthest thing from the truth, and they are only kidding themselves.

Even worse, I have heard companies tell me that me that they were going to win because they:

• Were the incumbent.
• Had a certain socio-economic status.
• Were well liked by the customer.
• Had the best proposed key personnel.
• Were going to reuse the same content that got them to a win on a similar bid in the past.
• Had the lowest price.
• Were going to introduce innovation.

Sadly, more than once, I have seen this false sense of bravado result in a competitive loss.

If you are a professional working in the GovCon marketspace, I am sure that at some point in your career you have heard the same remarks too. ?

There seems to be an increasing intellectual laziness going on in the GovCon marketspace.?I do not know the root cause, but I have heard many suggested reasons why, to include:

• Technology is dumbing down peoples’ ability to think.
• The educational system is no longer placing an emphasis on teaching critical thinking skills.
• Thinking is work and work takes time, and people are no longer committed to putting the time into it.
• People want the easy way out—They will take any short-cut that they can.

Maybe you have heard some of the same comments as well. Regardless, the likely reasons for this “death of thinking” are many and diverse.?

The Problem

Today, our country has some very serious economic, social, and security issues.?In some ways, greater than our country has experienced in several decades. Some have said that as a country, we are running off the fumes of the Greatest Generation, which overcame the Great Depression; helped win the Second World War; landed astronauts on the moon; and much more.??

The mission of government is too important and its challenges too complex to treat winning competitive government bids as a transactional activity or just a process—critical thinking is required. We in the GovCon Community, must realize that we are in a “Thinking Person’s Business”. ?Government and particularly the citizens of our country are depending on us to help it address these challenges.?To do this, a company first needs to first do the necessary thinking to win the competitive pursuit by demonstrating to government evaluators that it can best address the evaluation factors in the solicitation.

The Need

There is a need today for an innovative capability that enables companies to scale their strategic business development and capture, as well as solutioning and proposal development efforts.?One that enables business developers, capture managers, and others to perform the upfront thinking and analyses necessary to win a competitive GovCon pursuit.?You can call it a Cloud-based strategic analysis support system (SA2S), which:

• Enables key analyses essential to winning a competitive GovCon pursuit. For example:

―???Issue & Key Factor Analyses

―???Notional Winner Benchmark Analysis

―???Competitive Assessment

―???Discriminator Qualification

―???Gap Analysis

―???Win Strategy Development

―???Win Theme Formulation

―???Proposal Strategy Development

―???Strength Inventory Formulation

• Visually and digitally integrates captured data.
• Preserves digital threads of context of the company, customer, and competition as it pertains to the capture effort at hand.

Such a SA2S capability would allow business developers and capture managers to ensure that their competitive efforts produce the right strategies to counter the competition; result in a robust inventory of strengths against evaluation factors/subfactors to score the most points possible; and more well before any writing in response to the final solicitation ever starts.

The Benefits

In particular, the benefits of such a SA2S capability are that it would:

• Help do the necessary “strategic thinking before writing” in the opportunity assessment, capture, and proposal planning phases of competitive pursuits.
• Enable better decision-making, particularly at the C-Suite level.
• Assist with answering the most important question when pursuing a competitive pursuit ― “Why your company?”
• Support the design and development of the solution for your company’s competitive response.
• Store the rich context of how and why a deal was bid to increase overall company value over time.
• Capture the company’s intellectual capital to enable future growth.
• Quantify the growth status of your enterprise.
• Lower the cost of capturing new business.
• Protect the customer business that your company already has.
• Treat the Proposal Team as internal customers of a company’s business development and capture efforts versus falling victim to inadequate thinking and analysis earlier in the pursuit’s lifecycle.

GovCon Companies “Think to Win. Think to Help Our Country”

There is now available to the GovCon marketspace an innovative Cloud-based strategic analysis support system or SA2S capability. Yes, companies can now scale their scale their strategic business development and capture, as well as solutioning and proposal development efforts.?The SA2S is called “SET?”, and it is specifically designed to enable both business developers and capture managers to do the necessary “strategic thinking before writing” in the opportunity assessment, capture, and proposal planning phases of competitive pursuits.?As a result, SET enables the winning of more competitive GovCon pursuits and increasing the overall enterprise value of GovCon companies by providing the aforementioned benefits and more. ?

Author: Copyright 05 April 2023, Peter Lierni, Founder, Solutioneering, LLC

??www.solutioneering.company/www.solutionengineeringtool.company