As part of my ongoing Resilience series, I’ve been examining the habits and systems that shape how we work. This essay looks at one of our most entrenched rituals—the RFP—and what a year of rejection has taught me about its limits, its harms, and the openings it creates for something better.

Before I even opened the email, I knew what it would say.

Paragraph one: thank you.
Paragraph two: impressed by the proposal.
Paragraph three: went in another direction.
Paragraph four: unable to provide feedback due to the volume of submissions.

I knew it because I’ve seen it so many times in 2025. Over the course of this year, I’ve received a dozen of these. I’m 0 for 12. Zero-for-twelve on strategic planning proposals. And I don’t say that with shame or cynicism. It’s just the reality. By now, I can recognize the subject line’s cadence before I even click open. This most recent one felt like the last of the year. I won’t be writing any more.

And here’s the thing: those emails may be generic, but they are also sincere. I can read the effort between the lines, the fatigue in the phrasing, the genuine regret. I know it’s not fun to send those notes; I’ve sent them myself. The problem isn’t the people writing the rejections. It’s the system that keeps producing so many of them.

This has been my year of rejection. Real rejection. And I’ve grappled with it in waves.

Wave 1: Indignation. How could this happen? Didn’t they see the quality?
Wave 2: Confusion. Maybe I missed something. Maybe I didn’t read the moment right.
Wave 3: Hurt. Is my work really that unworthy?
Wave 4: Worry. What about my business? Will I survive?
Wave 5: Indifference. Why even bother?

That last stage is the one that concerned me most once I felt it settling in. Because indifference, once it sets in, drains motivation and—worse—hollows out belief.

But the more I sat with my indifference, the clearer it became that it isn’t directed at the sector or the work. It’s directed at the ritual of rejection itself. At some point, I stopped believing that the well-meaning RFP email blasted across a network of thirsty consultants was the gateway to anything truly consequential.

Remembering the Room

To be totally transparent, whenever I talk about rejection, I’m inevitably also talking to, and about, the me who was once standing outside rooms where decisions were being made and wanting badly to be invited in.

I can remember walking past glass conference rooms where “strategy” sessions were happening, seeing the people gathered around the table, wondering what was unfolding inside. They were the smart ones, the trusted ones. Maybe I filled out a survey. Maybe I was interviewed. But I wasn’t in the room.

And back then, I desperately wanted to be.

To me, that room was a symbol of access and belonging. Arrival. The big people’s work.

And some not-insignificant part of me spent years trying to earn my way into those rooms. Maybe that’s why this particular season of rejection hit as hard as it did. Despite all the success I have experienced in the past several years, it brushed up against something old and deep.

Here’s what I know now for a fact: I have been in those rooms. More rooms than I can count. I’ve facilitated them, led them, been a special guest in them, held them open for others. And having been inside, I can tell you the rooms aren’t magic. They’re just … rooms. The power we ascribe to them is mostly projection: the belief that strategy lives somewhere we’re not. Even the people in those rooms can feel as if the real strategic conversations are happening elsewhere.

So yes, my indifference is real. But it’s the kind that comes after seeing so much that I no longer feel the need to chase entry or approval. And I don’t think I’m alone. Across the field, I see brilliant people quietly opting out. We are not bitter; we are depleted.

And that’s a loss that threatens the whole ecosystem we claim to care about.

The Broken Machine

What if our RFP systems are broken? What if we’ve mistaken volume for virtue, openness for equity, process for fairness?

Stay with me.

We send out open calls for the sake of inclusion, but most of us don’t have the capacity to review them with any depth. I know firsthand. I’ve sat on the other side, in the evaluator’s chair, staring at hundreds of proposals in an inbox and knowing that fewer than one percent would be selected before the review even began. I remember the checklists, the scoring rubrics, the forced consensus. I remember how, despite our best intentions, quality wasn’t always the deciding factor.

We made decisions under time pressure, with partial knowledge, based on what was easiest to defend.

The irony is rich. The same sector that has sharpened critiques of white-dominant culture and its worship of the written word now measures everything through the written word. Not interviews. Not conversation. Not imagination.

We’ve elevated the review committee to deity status as if a group of busy people reading PDFs can conjure fairness. Committees have politics, too. They have blind spots, hierarchies, and unspoken allegiances. Rubrics are supposed to neutralize those things, but rubrics are interpretation devices. They only approximate the performance of objectivity.

And so what we end up producing isn’t equitable or inclusive. If anything, it’s an exhausting indictment of a system that has industrialized the very thing we claim to be opposed to.

On paper, open calls look like fairness: more people can apply, more voices can be heard. Inside the organization, they foster transparency and shared ownership. But that internal equity often comes at the expense of external equity.

Each additional layer of “internal review” means more unpaid labor from practitioners, more time lost to process, more distance between people who could simply… talk.

If you’re serious about equity, you have to account for the cost of process.

Let’s just do the math.

If an organization receives 100 proposals and each consultant spends about ten hours preparing theirs—from research to writing to revisions—that’s 1,000 hours of labor. Multiply that by a (modest) $250/hour rate, and you’re looking at a quarter of a million dollars in invisible work.

Now add the internal hours: design meetings, prep calls, reviewers, rubric builders, committee sessions, debriefs. You’re easily past half a million dollars in collective energy before a single ounce of actual work begins.

And what’s the product of all that labor? Let me just name the unnamable: fatigue.

By the time everyone finally gets to the table for the work, they’ve already depleted vital intellectual energy and expended considerable time that can’t be recouped. The consultants are tired from writing and pitching; the staff are tired from reading and deciding; the board is itching for results. And usually, the whole process is already a month or two behind because no one was realistic about the time, effort, or energy required.

So there is no space left for actual dreaming. We show up ready to execute, to get down to business, to prove the investment has been worth it.

When the Machines Start Talking to Themselves

There’s a bitter, almost comic edge to where this might be headed. I’ve already received at least one RFP that still had the GPT scaffolding lines in it—proof the thing was spun up by a model on the other end.

We are fast approaching a loop where RFPs are generated by GPT, responded to by GPT, scored by GPT against a rubric written by GPT, and then GPT serves as an analysis agent on the project.

None of that is inherently evil. But it does beg the question: what are we doing?

If the front end (the call), the middle (the proposal), and the back end (the analysis) are all increasingly automated, what kind of human are we selecting for? What kind of care, judgment, presence, and courage are we rewarding?

If process becomes automated, the counterweight must be authentic presence and real, situated thinking—the way a team metabolizes grief and conflict; the way a facilitator reads a room; the way a leader narrates a hard choice and stands in it.

If we don’t design for those human inflection points, we will optimize the production and hollow out the practice.

The Inheritance We Don’t Question

What’s both interesting and disconcerting is that the RFP—Request for Proposals—originated in early-20th-century government procurement reform. It was designed to ensure public accountability by preventing favoritism and guaranteeing competition. By the Cold War, it had become standard practice in federal contracting—a way to prove fairness through process, to document impartiality through paperwork.

Strategic planning came from the same intellectual soil. The methods we still use today—scenario analysis, long-range forecasting—were born at RAND Corporation in the 1940s as part of the military-industrial project to manage nuclear uncertainty. Consulting firms like McKinsey and BCG adapted those tools for corporations in the 1960s. By the 1980s, nonprofits and foundations had borrowed them to reassure boards and funders that their missions could be rendered measurable and predictable.

Together, the RFP and the strategic plan became the twin pillars of modern organizational faith: one decides who gets the money; the other decides how to spend it.

I don’t know about you, but I find it remarkable and not a small bit comical that these mid-century control technologies still define the most progressive parts of our field. We’ve reinvented nearly everything else about how we work—how we communicate, how we learn, how we gather information—yet these two rituals remain virtually untouchable.

Just imagine if we still drove across the country using folded paper atlases instead of GPS. If every time we wanted to call someone we had to patch through a switchboard operator. If the only way to watch a film was to wait for it to air once a year on network television.

We’d call that nostalgic or quaint, or simply antiquated.

Yet when it comes to planning and procurement, we treat mid-century bureaucracy as sacred practice. We cling to it as if its form guarantees its fairness.

So why are we, in an era defined by uncertainty, still using tools built to banish it?

My suspicion: because strategic planning carries so much money, visibility, and reputational risk, it rewards safety. Boards want something defensible. Funders want something measurable. Operators want something finishable. Executives want something sellable. The imaginative risk rarely survives.

The metric becomes: Will this get approved?

And when approval becomes the highest good, imagination dies quietly in the corner while we convince ourselves the slide deck is fresh and not something that could’ve been drafted on a weekend retreat for a fraction of the cost.

Here’s where I’m going with this: our reverence for strategic planning is distorting our priorities. The ritual has become so overinflated in our sector that it has eclipsed the operational and implementation work that truly moves missions forward. That work is slow, demands discipline, isn’t sexy and requires making hard choices and coordinating efforts.

Strategic planning, by contrast, often stops right where that work begins. The money stops there too. We concentrate resources on defining the destination and leave scraps for the infrastructure required to actually get there. The plan gets funded; the path does not. A classic structural mismatch.

So What Could We Do Differently?

1) Ask for Vision, Not Just a Plan.
Right now, proposals win or lose on the clarity of their process: the neatness of their steps, the symmetry of their timeline. But what if the process isn’t the spark? What if the spark is how a team navigates tension—how they make choices when things don’t go as planned, how they read a room, when they pause, when they push? None of that is visible in a static plan for the plan. Any project manager can design a timeline. Isn’t the real question: can they lead transformation?

2) Use Voice, Presence, and Situational Thinking as Data.
We live in an era rich with tools—Zoom, Loom, Miro, Padlet, audio notes—yet we restrict our most important decisions to documents that AI can now generate in minutes. Invite a five-minute video or audio note responding to a real scenario you are facing. Ask teams to articulate trade-offs, name tensions, and walk through a choice point out loud. You’ll learn more in five minutes of unscripted thinking than in 15 pages of templated prose.

3) Reimagine Selection.
If we can review 100 proposals, we can host 100 short conversations. The effort is equivalent; the understanding is not. A conversation reveals curiosity, temperament, adaptability—things no rubric captures. And let’s be honest: are we truly reading 100 proposals, or are we doing the law-school version of issue spotting—scanning for precedent, checking for red flags, rewarding the familiar? Is that really the lens we want strategic planning committees to privilege?

4) Focus on Operational Implementation.
This is where the most interesting work lives. The leaders I partner with aren’t just setting direction; they’re adapting to shifting terrain in real time. Implementation is where values get tested. Strategic planning should flow into and through operational practice, not hover above it. And yes, there are enough strategic plans sitting on shelves to fill the Library of Congress. Moving away from clunky decks hasn’t solved this problem. People transition. Funding fluctuates. Opportunities emerge no plan anticipated. What would change if we elevated operational design to the same stature as strategy—and used consultants to help us adapt, not just plan?

5) Rethink the Call Itself.
What if before putting out an RFP, we ask: Do we really need one? Could this be an invitation to conversation instead? Could we learn what we need through relationships we already have?

And here’s the uncomfortable truth most people won’t say out loud anyway: work already flows this way. The established firms, the most well-resourced shops, the legacy players? Trust me, they do not live and die by open calls. Their work comes through referral pipelines and institutional relationships most of us will never have access to. It is not immoral; it is simply how power and trust move in our field.

What that means is that RFPs, in many ways, are for the rabble—the broad public theater of fairness that obscures how decisions are actually made. And the brunt of the unpaid labor they generate falls on smaller, leaner, often BIPOC- or women-led shops who sink real time, real care, and real expertise into proposals that will never be read with the depth they deserve.

I am not saying abandon openness. I am saying be honest about how work truly flows, and design processes that don’t offload the cost of inclusion onto the very practitioners already operating on thinner margins. Referrals aren’t the enemy. The secrecy around them is.

6) See Consultants as Part of the Work, Not Just the Procurement.
I was recently speaking with an ED about a project when they said in passing that they had been talking with “a number of vendors.” I bristled. The word flattened something essential. I do not see myself as a vendor. Many of us who do this work are not here to sell a product. We’re here because we’ve chosen to support movements, leaders, and organizations from a position of partnership.

Organizations don’t want to be reduced to a category like “charity” or any other shorthand that erases their complexity and purpose. Consultants feel the same. When we call consultants vendors, we signal fungibility, that one is as good as another, as if what we bring isn’t deeply tied to our perspective, our lived experience, our judgment, our ability to hold ambiguity with you.

When we treat consultants as strategic capacity that augments and strengthens our own, the work gets better. I believe and hold steadfast to partnership as the key to making adaptive work possible.

Releasing the Ritual

In case you’re wondering if I’ll keep showing up, the answer is a resounding yes. Of course I will. I’m too deep in the game. I am not anti-planning. I’m the annoying reminder that planning is a means, not a faith.

The indifference I’ve described is the quiet confidence that comes from no longer needing validation from the room. I’ve been in those rooms. I’ll be in more. I know what’s real and what’s ritual. I know how often we mistake proximity to the plan for proximity to the work.

I also acknowledge that I can afford this indifference. I have enough work, enough relationships, enough runway to step back without falling through the floor. That’s not every consultant’s experience. And it’s certainly not lost on me that however challenging this year has been for me, it’s been grueling for so many of my colleagues and friends. The skittish landscape has been hard enough to stomach; the opaque RFP churn orchestrated by our own community — the very folks who are supposed to know better — has been its own kind of gut punch. And that cycle… it is wearing on our field. Slowly, quietly, it is pushing talent we simply cannot afford to lose out the door.

So yes, this has been my year of rejection. It’s cathartic to say it out loud.

But the reason I’m putting this into the world is so we can begin to reckon with the quieter harm we’re doing to our own in the pursuit of procedural fairness and performative inclusivity: the erosion of trust, the dulling of imagination, the normalization of exhaustion as the price of participation, the apathy and abandonment of gifted strategists.

We can do better by each other. And maybe this is the moment to release the rituals that no longer serve us — beginning with the one we cling to most reflexively. RIP RFP.