You lost an important bid.
There will probably be an explanation.
We were too expensive.
A competitor bought the work.
The client already had a preferred supplier.
They’ll regret choosing the cheaper option.
Perhaps some of that is true.
But here’s a different question:
Who owns the learning?
Is it the salesperson?
The bid team?
The Sales Director?
The MD?
The CEO?
Or does everybody own a different part of it?
Because knowing why the customer chose somebody else isn’t necessarily the same as understanding the choices within your own organisation that contributed to the outcome.
What did we assume?
What did we ask?
What didn’t we ask?
What did somebody notice but choose not to raise?
What information was available — and what did we do with it?
What pressures influenced the choices that were made?
And what choices were made further up the organisation that may have influenced those made further down?
None of those questions assumes somebody got it wrong.
They simply create an opportunity to become curious.
Because perhaps the real value of losing the bid isn’t discovering why they chose somebody else.
It is discovering something about how we make choices.
And that learning doesn’t belong only to the person who submitted the bid.
It could belong to everyone whose choices helped shape the outcome — from the CEO down.
So perhaps the question after losing the next bid shouldn’t only be:
Why did we lose it?
Perhaps it should also be:
Who owns the learning — and what are each of us going to learn from the choices we made?
Because the value of that learning may not become apparent in the next bid.
It may appear in a completely different choice, somewhere else in the business.
If this perspective has sparked your curiosity, I’ve explored these ideas in much greater depth in my paper, Human Agency. It’s available as a free download.
Human Agency and Responsibility: Do Organisations Understand What They Ask People to Own?
How Human Agency Strengthens Organisational Learning and Adaptability
Why Human Agency Turns Mistakes Into Organisational Learning