How to Drive Meaningful Change - Delivering your proposal
Having a great idea is unfortunately not enough to get it approved. The delivery of your proposal highly impacts the odds that proposal is approved.
Everyone can benefit from understanding and knowing how to build influence, implement change, and shape the organization and culture.
Much of it relies on learning and understanding the soft skill of navigating organizational politics.
This article is part of my series How to Drive Meaningful Change.
Delivering your proposal
After you craft a proposal, you need to effectively deliver it to the decision-makers and stakeholders. Knowing how to effectively tell your story and manage details can determine how successful your proposal is.
Concisely summarize
It’s really important to know how to summarize your proposal concisely. Leaders and executives typically don’t have a lot of time, and your item is likely on a long list of asks and problems they have to address.
Think about what your proposal - a summary structure will likely follow these patterns:
“I’ve looked at this situation, and we should do this for these reasons.”
“There’s a big problem here, and I have a path forward - here it is.”
“Here’s a quick description of what’s happening. here’s what we’re doing next.”
“Here’s what I need to achieve this result.”
“I have additional information - I need guidance on directives based on this information.”
You need to be able to quickly:
Make your ask clear
Establish context of the problem
Establish context of the ask
Remember: the value of the planning is in the plan. While you may not ever show anyone your proposal summary, crafting it allows you to think through it in a way that the major points are clearly laid out and addressed.
Make your ask clear
Most of the time, you are asking for something: a decision, a resource, information, etc. If you can’t articulate your ask and why you are asking in a single sentence, you aren’t being clear enough.
It’s not that you'll always present it in that short a format. It’s just that the skill of boiling it down is valuable for distilling the essence of whatever you want out of your proposal and drives attention to exactly what you need.
Once you understand what you’re trying to ask/recommend/conclude, start with that.
An example of a proposal summary to give raises:
I need to redirect $1,000,000 previously earmarked for additional hires into increasing compensation for existing team members.
Due to our rapid growth and lagging compensation strategy adjustments, we currently have new junior developers making more than tenured senior high-performing contributors.
The recent accidental leakage of the company salary spreadsheet has caused significant morale issues in all of our high performers, with churn expected for over 30% of our team as a result of this issue. Losing our top performers will ensure we will not meet our funding goals for this year.
We must ensure we balance and achieve equitable compensation for our team to be able to move forward. Losing all of our top performers is not an option.
Establish context of the problem
You can’t just ask for something and expect to get it. You need to have a reason or “why” behind your ask. That’s the context you need to summarize and deliver.
Context requires:
Explanation of a problem
Explanation of the cost of the problem
Explanation of the value of solving the problem
Explanation of the stakeholders of the problem
Most importantly - you need to establish the magnitude of the problem. Revenue terms are often the most impactful, but other framing like reputation, risk, retention, etc. can all be effective depending on your audience.
An example of a proposal summary to change an incident response:
We’ve experienced a quarter-million dollar incident, folks, and we are on the verge of making it worse with our recovery plan - I need alignment on a different plan.
Due to our earlier decision of releasing our fund management dashboard before testing was fully completed, a severe defect was identified in our refund logic. The defect, now fixed, temporarily allowed users to issue repeated refunds for the same transaction, which pulled money directly from our bank accounts. Operations has identified our system automatically issued $230,000 in duplicative refunds that we are unable to claw back automatically. Their recovery plan involves pursuing legal action against our top customers to claw back the money.
This will greatly damage our reputation with customers far beyond the cost of the incident. I recommend instead that we eat the cost as the reputation damage will out-weigh the funds recovered.
Establish context of the ask
Chances are if you are making an ask or proposing something, you already have a solution or direction you’d prefer in mind.
This is your intent or recommended solution. Be sure this is extremely clear and show evidence you’ve done the thinking.
I’ve seen many a proposal sink because the proposer didn’t make it clear what they were specifically asking for and why, or that they didn’t prove they did the thinking to provide confidence in their proposal.
Context requires:
Explanation of your ask/intent/solution/recommendation
Explanation of why of this approach
Explanation of tradeoffs and factors
An example of a proposal summary to change a technology:
I intend to transition our company from UJS and onto Vue.js.
We’ve experienced dozens of critical defects in just the past month and extremely delays in even simple front-end changes as a result of complicated UJS and lack of front-end or Javascript knowledge in our organization. If we wish to achieve our company’s development outcomes, we must address the root cause of the issue - our company’s increasing struggle using an outdated technology to achieve outcomes it wasn’t built to support. This requires a new front-end technology.
Vue.js, while new to me, is an extremely similar technology to Angular 1 that I am a deep expert in and can effectively train and educate a team around. I can, within three weeks, rapidly set up a front-end component and infrastructure system and conduct trainings to educate the team. I expect that even our back-end engineers can effectively make front-end changes within 2 weeks.
I evaluated other technologies like React and Angular 2 and found them quite difficult to use relative to the simplicity of Vue.js. The lack of in-house expertise also makes these challenging to build expertise for across the team.
Transitioning to Vue.js will greatly accelerate our product development efforts by a factor of 3x with higher quality, design fidelity, and lower defect rates.
Use the right proposal medium
One you have your proposal locked, you need to use the right proposal medium to communicate your proposal.
Presentations
Written documents
Group discussions
1:1s
Instant messaging
Presentation
A slide-deck presentation can be effective for asks to groups where the high-level details are enough to make a decision.
Some things to keep in mind:
Presentations aren’t great at diving into things or explaining a narrative.
If it requires deep thinking, it’s likely not the appropriate medium.
Keep it short. Less than 10 slides should be plenty. If you need more, you may benefit from another medium.
You’ll still likely need to prepare supplemental materials that dive into details.
Written document
A written document detailing your proposal can be extremely effective. You have tons of space to add details, explain thought processes, and dive deep.
Keep in mind:
It has to be extremely well organized. Without an effective narrative structure people will get lost.
Use the “newspaper approach”. Start with the headline, then summary, then go into details. Ensure you don’t start at the details or else people will get lost. Your conclusion should always be clear.
People may not have time. If you’re talking with your leaders, you want to be cognizant of their time and effectively leverage their attention span. A dense, multi-page document may just not be read.
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