The bidding process…but for humans. Part 1
Planning for Meltdowns Before They Happen
Welcome to my new series The bidding process… but for humans, where I unpack the things we pretend don’t matter in bids… except they absolutely do.
Real people deliver bids. Real people derail bids. And real people – with their egos, late drafts, Word formatting crimes and nonchalant attitude towards deadlines – are at the heart of whether a submission really sings or just mildly bruises your soul.
So instead of pretending bids are purely technical exercises, this series leans into the messy, emotional, very human side of dragging a team to the finish line.
Part 1 starts where every good bid should: with the things that will probably go wrong.
The art of the pre-mortem
Bids are fresh in my head after just crawling out of a big(ish) one. Naturally, my brain has already leapt to the next. And the next is… in a few weeks. So we’re doing the whole “set up for success” thing. You know, talking about our core values, alignment workshops and general ‘feel good’ sessions. Denial. (see my post about the five stages of a bid).
Most people think they love a post-mortem. In reality, they turn into Festivus: the airing of grievances, the finger-pointing, the dramatic reenactments of who did what to whom. It’s the ritual of gathering around the smouldering ruins, writing words like “leadership” and “time management” on post-it notes or butcher paper, and mumbling “We’ll do better next time,” knowing full well nothing will change.
“Let’s have an action list.”
“Let’s add more processes”
“Let’s have another workshop”
“Let’s have better onboarding”
Blah blah blah.
Cute. But let’s be realistic now.
A pre-mortem is where a bid should actually begin. This is where we set out everything we know can and will go wrong. When you design a bid with that reality in mind, everything becomes more robust, more consistent, and dramatically less… dramatic. It’s like designing a bridge assuming the river will flood. Because it absolutely will.
This isn’t negativity. This is lived experience. Many, many bids worth of it.
A pre-mortem helps in two big ways:
1. Finds the landmines before we step on them
Every bid has its predictable little gremlins:
the SME who vanishes into the void like it’s performance art
the person who announces in week 1 that the milestones “aren’t realistic” and then disappears until week 18
the reviewer with “thoughts” (i.e., demands + a Word doc full of tracked changes in all caps that should come with a trigger warning)
the overconfident PM who swears everything is in progress (it isn’t)
A pre-mortem lets us name these gremlins early (yes, they usually have names), so they don’t jump out at us at 11pm.
2. It forces honest (and often uncomfortable) conversations
Not the claws-out debriefing kind where everyone is traumatised and in tears.
Nor the corporate kind where everyone says “great learnings” (but don’t actually learn anything because they were busy checking emails).
Because let’s be real:
People will work in silos
Some SMEs will hoard information like a toddler guarding their last chicken McNugget (yum)
You will need Olympic-level strength to pull content out of SMEs
People will be late for meetings, deadlines, everything
You will sit in an empty virtual meeting room, decide to leave after 15 minutes, and as soon as you do, an alert pops up to say someone has started the meeting
And yes, there will be meetings that should have been emails. Far too many.
A pre-mortem asks the questions we usually avoid at the start because we are in Denial:
“Can we actually win this?”
“Do we have enough adults in the room?”
“Do we have the right people… or just warm bodies who said yes?”
I hate surprises, especially the kind that can derail a bid. Let’s drag everything into the light early.
A pre-mortem gives the team permission to say, “Here’s what I’m worried about,” without judgement and agree on how we’re going to plan for it… or at least soften the blow when it inevitably happens.
Building a safe space for all this honesty
A good pre-mortem only works if there’s actual psychological safety. The real, “you can say the scary thing without being silently judged into oblivion” kind. Because no one is going to confess their true bid fears if the room feels political, performative, or like whatever they say will label them as “problematic attitude, do not feed after midnight.”
The right vibe looks like:
The bid lead goes first. The tone-setter. If they’re open, honest, and not vibrating with suppressed rage, everyone else relaxes.
No ‘gotcha’ moments. This isn’t a witch hunt for who stuffed up last time. We’re surfacing issues, not building a dossier.
Vulnerability is allowed. Actual sentences like: “Here’s what I’m worried about…” instead of the classic: “Got it. All good 😊👍.”
A clear promise that what’s said won’t be weaponised later. Should this be standard? Yes. Is it? Absolutely not.
When people feel safe enough to drop the polite facade and say the real things, the planning improves, becomes based in reality, and we can actually prevent dumpster fires before they ignite.
The takeaway
A pre-mortem won’t magically erase the chaos of a bid. (If only)
But it will make the ride smoother and hopefully reduce the number of late-night panics. It can turn “Oh god, here we go again” into “Okay, we knew this might happen, let’s deal with it”
And if things still go sideways? Instead of “I told you so,” you get to calmly say, “This was flagged early as a possible outcome.”
Not smug. Just factual.
At the end of the day, a pre-mortem doesn’t guarantee a perfect bid. Bids depend on people, and people are… people. But it does give you a better fighting chance and far fewer nasty surprises.
Do it early, do it honestly. Your future self will thank you.
