Whoever designs the mandatory proposal template decides which benefits can be shown and which disappear, so a well-designed form lets the right cases be made in every decision that passes through it.
Borderline: whether this move is justified depends on the situation, and only the person in it can judge.
An example
Portfolio reviews at a mid-size medical device company ran on a two-page template from the finance team: five-year net present value, a payback year, a risk score, and a checkbox for strategic fit. The head of product development had watched three platform projects lose to line extensions under it, because a platform's value lay in the products it made possible later, and the template had no place to show that. She asked the chief financial officer to let her redesign it with his team. The new version kept every financial field and added two: the follow-on products a project would enable, each with a rough value range, and the cost of arriving late if a competitor got there first. Finance tested it on the previous year's decisions. At the next review, a catheter platform that would have ranked fourth under the old form was funded first.
Why it works
A template decides which benefits arrive already translated into the reviewers' habitual way of reading, so proposals that fit it look better and are easier to make: the champion fills in the boxes and the form tells the story. Proposals whose value sits in what the form leaves out, such as later options, brand, effects on other products, or avoided risk, must squeeze that value into fields where it reads as weak, or push it into an appendix nobody reads, and their champions pay extra to fight the form. The effect is strongest when the template is mandatory, reviewers read it first, and few notice what it excludes.
The thinking behind it
Herbert A. Simon Simon's Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World (1971) argues that in an information-rich world the scarce resource is attention, so recipients rely on whatever is put in front of them. Reviewers facing dozens of proposals read the template and little else. Whoever designs the template therefore decides which benefits get any of the reviewers' attention, which is why adding fields for follow-on products and the cost of arriving late can change the ranking.
Daniel Kahneman In The Framing of Decisions and the Psychology of Choice (1981), Kahneman and Tversky showed that equivalent descriptions of a choice produce predictable reversals of preference. A template is a frame applied to every proposal at once: a project shown only by its five-year value is a different choice from the same project shown with the products it enables. Redesigning the form changes the frame for every decision that passes through it.
When it fits
Reach for it when the decisions you care about keep going one way because of how cases are presented, and you have, or can borrow, the authority to change the form, through the function that owns it, a sponsor who chairs the review, or a mandate to fix the process. It helps to have a past decision or two that the redesign would have changed.
How to use it well
Find what the current form cannot show. Read the last year's decisions and look for the kind of benefit that kept losing.
- Work with the template's owner, usually finance or the program office, and keep every field they rely on. Add fields; leave theirs alone.
- Make the new fields as disciplined as the old ones, with ranges, assumptions, and the name of whoever estimated them.
- Test the redesign on past decisions with the owner's team before using it on live ones, and apply it to every proposal, including those you oppose.
Where the form cannot change in time, open a second channel, such as a strategy memo or a pre-read with the chief executive, where the excluded material can reach the people deciding.
What it costs and where it backfires
Redesigning a form means taking on the people who own it, and they will read a new field as a way around their discipline unless it is as rigorous as the old ones. Soft fields also invite inflated estimates, which will discredit the change. The line is symmetry. Once you design a form to hide the benefits of proposals you oppose, or apply it only to rivals, you are rigging every decision that passes through it, and the form will carry that rigging long after you leave.
When it is used on you
Proposals that keep losing on a form with no field for what makes them worth funding are fighting the form as well as the reviewers. Push to redesign the template, with the owner's help where possible. Meanwhile open a second channel, a strategy memo, a pre-read with the chief executive, or an appended narrative, and check whether reviewers ever read past the form.