Made by Many was one of the very first ‘agencies’ to champion Lean methodology, offering clients a faster, more effective way to learn and innovate through evidence-fuelled prototyping. But let’s be honest, the flames of these principles have been sufficiently fanned by countless practitioners over the years and anyone in a position to even be considering writing an RFP will know at least a little about why this approach makes sense. Indeed, most clients that approach us are practically leading this conversation, expressing eager interest in working closely with us, iterating strategies and solutions together.

But, as anyone in this business knows, there is often daylight between what people say and what they do. Habits kick in. And habits are the enemy of good intentions.

And so an RFP is written, which is theoretically a sensible starting point: getting down all the important stuff and setting clear expectations and needs. But what happens next is a little odd when you think about it: the challenge is to ‘go away’ and then come back with a proposal.

I must emphasise that I’m not attacking the authors of RFPs; I have used the word habit very deliberately. RFPs are the documents that have always been written in these situations, so they continue to be. But there could not be a greater ideological gap between writing a proposal in isolation and the spirit of true, collaborative, making-led innovation. This scenario could be caricatured in a sentence like this: ‘We love how you collaborate closely with clients to work through problems, now go away and work out how you can help us.’
While this approach does test the agency in question and allow a more efficient pitch process, much is lost in an engagement like this. And it also means more work for the client in question. They have to spend hours crafting a brief, making sure they say all the right things using words that can faithfully sustain meaning and context in people’s brains without witnessing this directly. All projection, no discussion. [In fact, we have on more than one occasion been told we can not discuss the details of an RFP because it would be ‘unfair’ to the other agencies!]

I propose a different approach. One that, if I was feeling ‘headliney’, I might refer to as an RFW: a request for a workshop.

In this scenario, the client wouldn’t need to spend time writing an extensive brief. They could just share a paragraph or two setting up some basic context and then invite agencies to run a two-hour workshop to not only extract the brief together, as a team, but to instil a bias for action: getting up from the table and starting the process of ‘doing’.

Here are just a few potential benefits of this kind of approach:

In this situation, the agency’s objective is to end the session with a palpable sense of progress: a thorough mapping of the opportunity, risks and constraints and a real sense of what it would be like to work together. It would also be a brilliant way to work out which agencies are good at doing the right things and not just saying the right things. This is the sort of challenge we would thrive on.

The job would have effectively started, giving the client a taste of actually ‘working with’ multiple agencies. And when they select the winner, things would already be in motion. All that talk about moving faster and learning more quickly will have escaped from the creds deck and formed some scaffolding on which the engagement can develop.

Final note:
This post isn’t in response to any particular RFP or client we’ve been working with — honest! It’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while. However, if anyone reading this is about to draft an RFP and send it round to some agencies, maybe consider making it an RFW instead. Just as an experiment. Because experiments are great ways to break habits.