Big table.

Bigger egos.

Billion-dollar numbers floating around like confetti.

We are in the middle of a key meeting of a bid for a PPP project.

Slide on the screen.

The Bid Director clears his throat.

“And now, I’ll pass it to – let’s say - Carlos, who will walk us through the interface risk allocation model.”

Silence.

People start looking to each other.

More looking.

Some rumours.

Someone nervously laughed…

Carlos is not in the room.

Not in the building.

Not in the country.

Where the hell is Carlos?

Bathrooms in these buildings are quite hidden… but getting lost in the last 30 m from the lift to the meeting room?

The slide stays there.

Dense.

Unreadable.

Full of arrows pointing at other arrows.

Boxes connected to boxes that explain nothing.

It looks like someone asked ChatGPT to explain quantum mechanics in Excel 2003.

Everyone stares.

No one understands the slide.

No one wants to admit it.

The Technical Lead squints.

The Financial Modeler pretends to check emails.

The Legal Counsel studies the ceiling as if relief clauses were written there.

And the Bid Manager…

He starts sweating.

Not normal sweating.

The kind of sweating that happens when you realize two things at the same time:

1. The slide makes no sense... and he did not verify it.

2. The only person who could explain it… vanished 30 seconds before the meeting.

The silence becomes physical.

You could slice it with a butter knife.

Actually, no.

You could slice it with the career of the person who “decided” not to rehearse.

More silence...

Silence cutting throats…

Apparently, it did... they sent this to Carlos at the end of the meeting:

“Don’t bother coming to the office tomorrow, we’ll send your things to home”.

Who knows… but probably Carlos had mentally left the bid weeks ago.

No alignment.

No prep.

No ownership.

No rehearsal.

In PPP bids, we obsess over:

Financial close

Risk matrices

Availability and KPI regimes

Interface agreements

But we forget something brutally simple.

Clarity wins bids.

Not intelligence.

Not complexity.

Not 120-slide decks.

Clarity.

If your slide needs a missing person to be understood…

You don’t have a slide.

You have a liability.

And here’s the brutal truth:

Most bids are not lost because the competitor is smarter.

They’re lost because someone in the room cannot explain their own work in 90 seconds under pressure.

I’ve seen billion-dollar projects swing on moments like this.

Not because of math.

Because of silence.

Rehearse.

Simplify.

Own your slide.

And never, ever pass the mic to a ghost.

I was not in that room… I was told by a colleague…

In any case, I’m sure that you don’t want to be in that room.

More about PPPs, common sense and strategy, below

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