Of course you don’t - what a ludicrous notion! No child would put up with something so crushingly boring as to be read a list! No, your Mom read you stories. She read stories because stories are interesting, they’re entertaining, they have fascinating characters who face and overcome challenges. But most important, stories teach lessons. They have morals that allow us to see and understand things that we didn’t before.
Stories are a whole lot more interesting and valuable as agents of communication than are lists. Lists are not only boring to read, they don’t provide any insight into the value you brought to the project. Generic descriptions are, well, generic and fail to get anyone excited.
Fortunately, there are other ways to show your experience and the value you bring to your clients.
The RFP stated: Please address your firm’s approach to creative problem solving.
The response could have been a generic description such as:
Acme Engineers is dedicated to bringing a creative approach to problem solving. We begin by assembling a team of experts who study the problem from as many angles as possible. We then convene a brainstorming session in which creative ideas are encouraged and recorded. The ideas are then ranked using a voting mechanism, which identifies the top five ideas.
Projects on which we’ve utilized creative problem solving include:
- Followed by the predictable, boring and
uninspiring list
The Farmers Are Planting Drywall!
When Beaumont Health Systems wanted a new office building, they specified that the project should be LEED Certified. This had implications for the building, but also for the waste stream that every construction project generates. The goal was set at diverting at least 50% of the waste from landfills.
Never content to simply meet the goals, we set up an in-house contest with teams assigned to each component of the waste stream. Who could divert the largest volume of waste?
By the time we were finished, we’d diverted 350 tons of concrete, brick and block from the landfill and crushed it off-site for fill and other appropriate applications. We worked with the waste management company to begin a sorting process for the general trash, leading to waste diversion of close to 80%. But the winning team, with the most creative solution, had located a landscape supplier who took the gypsum from the old drywall to be ground up and resold as farm fertilizer.
The project is currently diverting 75% of the construction waste from the landfill, which earned the project two LEED credits, allowed Beaumont to leave a minimal impact on the environment and raised awareness within the construction workforce, Beaumont employees and the community at large.
A story like this ensures that the client will actually read it. Who, browsing through a proposal and coming across a headline like that, would not? Also, the story clearly demonstrated the firm’s creative problem solving ability in a way that no generic description or list ever could. And that’s all you need. No boring lists. No generic descriptions. Just an engaging tale of remarkable accomplishment. The kind you achieve every day.
