There is a particular kind of frustration that comes from watching something fail that didn’t have to.
Not the frustration of being ignored, that’s common enough and usually survivable. Something more specific. The frustration of being able to see clearly what’s needed, of working every available channel to make that visible to the people who need to see it, and of watching the gap between what you can see and what the organisation can act on prove unbridgeable.
I’ve felt that frustration once more acutely than any other time in my career.
This is that story. Including the part where I got it wrong.
The client
The organisation issuing the bid was not a standard commercial enterprise with sustainability bolted onto its annual report as a concession to investor pressure.
It was a global leader in health, nutrition, and bioscience whose entire operating philosophy was built around a different understanding of what a business exists to do. People, planet, livelihood — not as a values statement decorating the reception area but as the architecture of every significant decision the organisation made. The UN Sustainable Development Goals were not a reporting framework for them. They were the reason the business existed.
When they issued a bid for a major technology and services partnership they were not looking for a supplier. They were looking for a partner who understood what they were actually for and who could demonstrate, concretely and measurably, how the proposed solution would advance the outcomes they existed to deliver.
I read the brief carefully. I understood what was being asked. And I understood immediately that responding to this brief the way we would respond to any other bid would not just fail to win — it would signal a fundamental misreading of who the client was.
What I built and what happened to it
I positioned the entire approach around genuine alignment with the client’s philosophy. I wrote the sustainability component in full. I designed an animation to tell the end-to-end story — not of our services and capabilities, but of the client’s own philosophy brought to life through the solution we were proposing. I argued consistently that this was not an addition to the bid. It was the bid.
The bid executives saw it differently. Not through malice, I want to be clear about that, because the easy version of this story makes them the obstacle and me the visionary and that version isn’t honest or useful.
They saw a client with a significant services requirement and a proven portfolio of capabilities that could meet it. They were experienced people who had won bids before by leading with what they knew how to deliver. That approach had worked. There was no obvious reason it shouldn’t work again.
What they hadn’t fully understood was that this client was different in a way that made the standard approach not just suboptimal but actively counterproductive. Arriving with a services pitch to a client whose identity was built around purpose-led outcomes didn’t just miss the mark. It told the client something about how we saw them.
How it ended
My role was gradually narrowed. The sustainability components were treated as a discrete workstream rather than the spine of the entire response. Once that work was completed I was stepped back from the wider bid discussions.
The bid was lost.
The feedback reflected exactly what I had been trying to prevent - a lack of genuine alignment with the client’s philosophy. The components that were remembered were the sustainability narrative and the animation.
The work that had been marginalised was the work the client had been looking for.
What I got wrong
I worked the informal channels when the situation required formal ones.
I had open discussions with the team. I guided the narrative through the process stages as best I could. I was vocal, directly and persistently, about the direction I thought we were taking.
What I didn’t do was stop at the beginning and force the formal conversation that the situation required.
I should have called an internal management meeting before the bid work started in earnest. I should have laid out precisely what the brief was asking for, what the client’s philosophy meant for how we needed to respond, and what the risks were of defaulting to the standard approach. I should have defined those risks explicitly, not as a concern or a perspective but as a formal risk to the bid outcome, and sought explicit agreement on the strategy before a single word of the response was written.
That process might not have changed the outcome. But it would have given the argument a formal status inside the organisation that informal advocacy never achieved.
Being right about the direction wasn’t enough. The system needed more than clarity. It needed process, ownership, and formal agreement. Without those, individual insight, however accurate, remains exactly that. Individual. Unowned. Unable to move the organisation.
*This is the sixth entry in the Predictive Purpose journal — a book being built in public. If you’re reading this for the first time, start at the beginning. Subscribe at neilcatton.substack.com.
Neil Catton is the author of The Next Evolution, The Cognitive Crucible and The Shadow System - available on Amazon, and writes at the intersection of technology, ethics, and human purpose.