The RFP problem no one wants to talk about

If you work in consulting, professional services, or any field that regularly responds to RFPs, this might sound familiar.

Responding to an RFP often feels a bit like being handed a puzzle box with half the pieces missing - and being told you’ll be graded not just on whether you solve it, but on how elegantly you guess what the final picture was supposed to be.

December just happens to be when that feeling is amplified. RFPs land as offices empty out, inboxes switch to auto-replies, and timelines somehow get tighter instead of looser.

The holiday timing simply makes the issue harder to ignore. But this isn’t really about me not wanting to work over the holidays. It’s about a process that routinely asks people to do their best thinking with incomplete information, rigid timelines, and very little opportunity for real conversation.

It’s about a process that many of us quietly struggle with, rarely question out loud, and collectively accept as “just the way it’s done” - even when it’s clearly not working as well as it could.

I’m genuinely curious: how many others are wishing for a better path forward - and wondering why we’re all pretending this is the best one available?

‍The great RFP guessing game

Talk to almost anyone who regularly responds to RFPs and you’ll hear a similar story.

You review the document carefully. You submit clarifying questions. You receive answers that help a bit - but not enough. New questions surface. You want to understand the context behind the request, the priorities that matter most, and how success will actually be measured.

And yet, requests for conversation ahead of the proposal deadline are often declined.

The core challenge is this: proponents are expected to submit highly tailored, thoughtful proposals without truly knowing what problem they’re being asked to solve. At the same time, clients are often still working through how to define their needs in a way that translates cleanly into an RFP.

The result is a guessing game on both sides - and not a fun one. This is less “Jeopardy!” and more “escape room designed by someone who has already left the building.”

The workflow is unfortunately predictable:

1.      Proponents make their best guesses and a silly number of assumptions.

2.      Clients receive proposals that vary wildly in interpretation and approach.

3.      Procurement narrows the list.

4.      Someone inevitably says, “This still isn’t quite what we meant.”

5.  We choose X… (hoping it's a good choice)

This isn’t a critique of individuals or teams. It’s a structural issue baked into the process itself - one that quietly turns experienced professionals into highly paid mind-readers.

A colossal waste of effort (on both sides)

A single proposal can easily represent 30 or more hours of work. That’s 30 hours spent assembling context, interpreting intent, pressure-testing assumptions, and trying to reverse-engineer what the client actually wants - without being allowed to ask them directly before you hit “submit”. Multiply that across 20 or 30 respondents and the collective investment becomes staggering.

Which raises an honest question: what is the cost‑benefit of this approach?

Procurement teams, often grounded in supply chain disciplines, are tasked with ensuring fairness, objectivity, and equal opportunity to bid. These principles are especially critical in the public sector, and they matter.

But fairness without dialogue comes at a cost.

When the process prevents meaningful conversation, it becomes impossible to talk about trade‑offs between quality, scope, cost, and outcomes. It assumes the problem is already fully defined, when in reality, many projects are still evolving.

The result is a system where smart, capable people spend significant time shooting in the dark, and organizations sort through proposals that don’t truly reflect what they need.

The part no one wants to acknowledge

There’s another tension here that rarely gets said out loud.

In some cases, an organization already has a preferred approach (or even a preferred proponent) and an RFP becomes the mechanism used to formalize that direction. The rest of the field is invited to compete, but without access to the same context or insight.

That dynamic creates frustration on all sides and contributes to a broader productivity problem. When effort is expended primarily to satisfy process rather than improve outcomes, everyone loses.

If there is already a preferred path or partner, being honest about it upfront creates less friction, better work, and far more efficient use of time and resources for everyone involved. And let’s be honest: Canada already has a productivity problem. We don’t need to make it worse by pretending we don’t already know the direction we want to take.

A modest, radical proposal

So here’s the question I keep coming back to: why aren’t we talking more openly about this?

If most of us can recognize the problem, and many of us are independently reinventing the same coping strategies, that’s usually a sign the system (not the people) is the thing that needs adjusting.

If the goal of an RFP is to get the best possible outcome - not just to run a procedurally clean process - then it seems worth asking whether small changes could deliver significantly better results.

And that brings me to a simple, practical ask: create space for conversation before proposals are due.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting that organizations sit down for thirty separate one‑on‑one interviews with every interested proponent. That’s not realistic or cost‑effective either, and it simply shifts the burden from one part of the system to another.

But there are middle‑ground options that acknowledge both fairness and practicality.

• Small group interviews
• A single, well‑facilitated Q&A session with all interested proponents
• Even an extended, open forum early in the process - before proposals are written - where real questions can be asked and answered in real time

Because the traditional approach of, “Submit your questions by this date, and we’ll respond by that date”, often creates more confusion than clarity. Answers tend to be carefully worded, overly cautious, or unintentionally vague. Sometimes they feel more like PR than guidance. And instead of resolving uncertainty, they generate follow‑up questions that no longer have a place to go.

That’s the part that feels especially wasteful - not just of time, but of good intent on all sides.

Build a short interview period into the RFP timeline. Offer structured one‑on‑one discussions. Allow proponents to ask real questions and understand how you’re thinking about the work. When this happens, proposals improve dramatically. They align more closely with actual needs. Clients gain clearer insight into what’s possible, what’s realistic, and what trade‑offs exist.

I’ve seen this work firsthand.

One organization issued an RFP and explicitly invited conversation. We talked through their challenges and priorities. They gained clarity about what they were really looking for, and we understood how we could help.

We won the work. They got a solution that genuinely fit.

Rant over. Conversation welcome.

So yes - this has been a bit of a rant. But it’s one that’s been bugging me for years, popping up every time I watch smart, well-intentioned people try to navigate the same maze with the same missing map.

If others are experiencing the same frustrations, I’d love to hear about it. And if you’re on the procurement side, I’m genuinely curious about your take as well.

There are real tensions here, and no perfect answers - but pretending the system works flawlessly doesn’t help anyone.

Let’s start talking about it.

Feature image photo by Campaign Creators on Unsplash