ProposalSpeak

I’ve become a client again for another company. And I’m just reading through a proposal, and it’s bullshit! It’s not that it’s badly written or bad contents, it’s just that it’s written in what I now call “ProposalSpeak”. It’s like the difference between a human being, and the person that they become when you poke a camera, or video camera at them, or put them on stage. Suddenly they freeze and become all unnatural and self conscious.

Well it’s the same with proposals. Suddenly the supplier freezes and starts using words like “Solution” “Need” “Requirements” “Flexible” What do all these words mean? They’re just thrown into a document to pad it out, but with no context or soul.

And what really hurts, is that it’s the type of bullshit I’d write and have written, when putting a proposal together. Why can’t suppliers just say,
“It does what you want it to do, it falls within your budget and timescales, here’s someone who’s done it already, and we’re a nice company to deal with!” That’s all I want!

And it’s explained quite well here, Healthy Seeds of Doubt
Not everyone is like me, and wants to cut straight to it. Maybe other people want these long padded out proposals which say nothing.

I presented this week to a group of about 70 people, on Presentation Skills, and I asked the group if they can remember a single thing from any PowerPoint presentation they've attended in the past year, and I bet them that not one person could remember a single thing. They looked at each other and I think agreed! Can you imagine the waste of time and resource of those people, not to mention the other attendees, who have sat in on presentations, and nothing has been remembered. Perhaps they were all there just to witness the information and not remember it!

It's the same with proposals. No one likes writing them, and no-one likes reading them, so can we find another way of doing business please!!

Just as we freeze in front of the camera lens, so we freeze when we have to write something to impress someone else, instead of being ourselves. That's why Weblogs are so important, because we write for ourselves and other people read it. This is flowing, but ask me to write even my own CV, or a letter, and I too clam up. Can't we all agree from now on, to cut to it, and stop using ProposalSpeak?

Comments

[cliff]

Great post, Tony. I think you would do the world a great service if you put all these words on a webpage, and challenged people to sign a pledge not to use them. I'd sign up. Here's a site that started a list for the web economy: http://www.dack.com/web/bullshit.html

[Nigel Burke]

Thought you might find this interesting :

http://jstrande.typepad.com/storyblog/2004/08/storytelling_th.html

Storytelling That Moves People
I just happend to come across this old article in HBR - it is fantastic!!

Description:

When executives need to persuade an audience, most try to build a case with facts, statistics, and some quotes from authorities. In other words, they resort to "companyspeak," the tools of rhetoric they have been trained to use. In this conversation with HBR, Robert McKee, the world's best-known screenwriting lecturer, argues that executives can engage people in a much deeper--and ultimately more convincing--way if they toss out their PowerPoint slides and memos and learn to tell good stories. As human beings, we make sense of our experiences through stories. But becoming a good storyteller is hard. It requires imagination and an understanding of what makes a story worth telling. All great stories deal with the conflict between subjective expectations and an uncooperative objective reality. They show a protagonist wrestling with antagonizing forces, not a rosy picture of results meeting expectations--which no one ends up believing. Consider the CEO of a biotech start-up that has discovered a chemical compound to prevent heart attacks. He could make a pitch to investors by offering up market projections, the business plan, and upbeat, hypothetical scenarios. Or he could captivate them by telling the story of his father, who died of a heart attack, and of the CEO's subsequent struggle against various antagonists--nature, the FDA, potential rivals--to bring to market the effective, low-cost test that might have prevented his father's death. Good storytellers are not necessarily good leaders, but they do share certain traits. Both are self-aware and both are skeptics who realize that all people--and institutions--wear masks. Compelling stories can be found behind those masks.