RFP: Request For Procrastination
February 25, 2020
By Gonzalo López Martí Creative director, etc. / lmmiami.com/
- It happens again and again.
- Regardless of the number of weeks or months an agency is given to prepare a presentation for a pitch or RFP, the last stretch will involve sleepless nights, lost weekends, exhaustion and nervous breakdowns.
- Even if the entire payroll of said agency is assigned to the project with ample time to react, the outcome will be the same.
- The very definition of a paradox: the more staff one adds to complete a certain task, the longer it takes to be fulfilled.
- Pathological procrastination?
- Indecisiveness?
- Lack of leadership?
- Sheer folly?
- Why does it always have to be this stressful?
- Are we masochists condemned to suffer for our art?
- Is it a conspiracy by C-Suite sadists to keep the lower levels of the totem pole continually on edge, off balance, on the tip of their toes, unable to discern the urgent from the important?
- By the way, the phenomenon is not new and has been analyzed.
- If it serves as some sort of fool’s consolation, it is not privy to the ad business either.
- There even is a law describing it.
- The so-called Parkinson’s Law: “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”
- The concept was created during the mid 50s in the UK, when a gentleman by the name of Cyril Northcote Parkinson, himself a writer and naval historian, noticed that, despite the fact that the British Empire was shrinking year after year, the payroll of the pompously named Colonial Office kept growing.
- Exponentially.
- The first formulation of the law came in the form of a satirical magazine article.
- As is the case with many new ideas and insights, it was initially concocted in jest.
- Yet it proved to be empirically and factually true.
- There’s more where that came from.
- Noticing that he had struck a chord, the author later wrote a book elaborating on various aspects of bureaucracies and their tendency to metastasize.
- Mr. Parkinson coined another law: the law of triviality.
- Large organizations will squander an inordinate amount of time and critical resources addressing trivial issues.
- Rings a bell?
- Sure does.
- I’d say every single pitch or RFP I’ve partaken of fits this description.
- Which is great if you are a free-lancer on the clock collecting three figures per hour.
- 90% of the time bickering over minutiae.
- 10% of the time -when there barely is any time left- to finally select and mock up a sellable idea.
- A dysfunctional clash of egos, neuroses, agendas, busywork, disparate skills and misplaced survival instincts.
- Especially the latter.
- Sure enough, Mr. Parkinson might have been a humorist but he had a keen eye to dig up behavioral insights.
- In addition to describing the problem he identified its two main drivers:
- -Managers make work for each other to justify their salaries.
- -Managers want to multiply subordinates, not rivals.
- A very human attempt at self-preservation.