Winning by Subtraction: Stripping Out the Eight Wastes of Bidding

Bid and proposal teams often feel under pressure to add more – more content, more process, more polish. But real breakthroughs don’t come from addition. They come from subtraction. Borrowed from Lean and Kaizen, the “eight wastes” framework offers a lens for leaders to see where energy drains away – and where smarter teams can cut.

1. Defects: Errors like missing forms, AI hallucinations, or the wrong client’s name. These burn hours, damage trust, and can disqualify bids instantly. Fix: Build quality in early (“shift-left”) and show leaders the financial impact of defects to drive prevention.
2. Overproduction: Drafting without a plan or stuffing oversized appendices evaluators never asked for. The result is bloat and diluted messaging. Fix: Appoint a “kill-switch reviewer” empowered to cut. Where page limits apply, practice deliberate under-writing and use AI to streamline – not inflate – content.
3. Waiting: SMEs delivering inputs late, teams stalled by slow go/no-go calls, or client deadline extensions. Idle time compresses schedules, fuelling fire-drill behaviour. Fix: Time-box go/no-go decisions (e.g., 48 hours post-RFP). Use predictive SME scheduling to lock in inputs before bottlenecks appear.
4. Non-utilised talent: Lessons logged but not learned. Proposal pros treated as admin. Leaders disengaged – or engaged too late. This affects competitiveness and morale. Fix: Give leaders veto rights only if they engage early. After each bid, map how individuals applied unique strengths beyond their job descriptions.
5. Transport: Leadership reviewing in sequence rather than in parallel or re-keying data between systems. This drags timelines and fuels duplication. Fix: Encourage real-time collaboration. Connect systems through APIs and automate hand-offs to remove rework.
6. Inventory:Repositories cluttered with duplicate answers and outdated material. Searches slow down, libraries lose trust, and stale content creeps into live bids. Fix: Elevate client-validated exemplars into a gold tier. Run content “retirement ceremonies” to purge low-value material.
7. Motion:Status meetings that could be an email instead, or managers chasing updates across channels. These drain energy and fragment focus. Fix: Run motion audits after each bid to cut wasted steps. Consolidate updates into a single source of truth, such as a live dashboard.
8. Extra-processing:Over-polishing through endless AI prompting or preference-driven rewrites. Evaluators don’t reward this. Fix: Build a prompt library so AI outputs are usable first time. Enforce a scoring lens – edits only where points are gained.

Reducing waste isn’t just about saving hours. For directors, it safeguards competitiveness, lowers cost per win, and creates the conditions for sustainable performance. For managers and writers, it protects energy, sharpens focus, and restores pride in the final product. Strip out the eight wastes, and you free your team to do what matters most: win.