In theory we all base our decisions on Evidence. In practice, Evidence in decision-making is greatly overrated. When we look at how most people make everyday purchasing decisions we can see that habit, prejudice and convenience … are the most frequent determinants of purchasing routine items. An interesting phenomenon is that people often take a lot of time and effort over mid-sized purchases like a washing machine or refrigerator, comparing many products and researching them thoroughly but will often buy the first or second car or house that they see. Multiple small purchases over a year can add up to thousands of dollars and yet they are made without much thinking. Groceries, lunch, fast food and treats are good examples. A hundred 10 minute calls on a mobile phone can pay a year’s electricity bills.
People know this but still make those calls and complain that they have not got enough to pay the electricity. When we look at purchasing decisions for Government and companies we find that a lot of the things that drive consumer spending also apply for large purchases. Tender processes are supposed to ensure that decisions are free of bias – or evidence based, which is the current buzz word.
Yet, the same kinds of bias is found in formal processes. The way it is expressed is just different. Back in the 1990’s it was said “Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM”. That was a statement about risk taking. If you were confused or overwhelmed by information then you might as well take the safe option and choose a “brand” you know and feel might be worth trusting. It seems that there is a great divide between those who want vast amounts of evidence to sift through and those who want almost none. Some people like myself like to have both, but that is rare.
The usual case is that you have someone who wants a one-pager to make a decision without “irrelevant” facts to get in the way. Or you get the one who needs everything ever written on a subject before making a statement supporting any course of action. When tendering you need to second guess which approach is being take. The safe option is to do a tight and concise Executive Summary outlining what you are offering and to support that with detailed proposal documentation that gets into the details and justifications. For really big tenders that works. For small tendering that is frequent and boringly repetitive, there is a problem.
The tendering process is tightly controlled but the evaluation can be cursory and quite arbitrary. That means you have no idea of how to approach it as a tenderer. You have to make the best guess, or better still, try to find out who is doing the evaluation so you can target the way you know they work. I submitted a proposal last week that offered very high level expertise in every single area that they identified. I am nearly certain that there would be almost no other proposal that would offer better. If so there could only be 2 or 3 other organisations with the experience and available people. The proposal was not even looked at. The response was “we had so many responses to this that we sorted them by price and eliminated all the ones over (a nominated amount) and then chose the first four we saw where we knew the names”. There you go – I did not ask the question “Where is the compliance with the Financial Management and Accountability Act to ensure value for money when expending public funds?”