Did my team's proposal miss anything?

When a proposal lands on your desk, finished and ready to sign off, it tends to arrive with a certain confidence behind it. People worked on it. They thought it through. They agree it's right. And most of the time it is solid work.

But "the team is convinced" and "the decision is sound" are two different things - and a proposal can clear the first bar comfortably while falling short on the second.

⚡ A proposal can be complete for the team and incomplete for the decision.

It isn't that the team fell short. It happens precisely because the people who build a proposal share the same brief, the same context, and often the same blind spots. They check it the way they built it. What gets missed can be one thing or several: whatever none of them was looking at.

Here are some examples.

The gap was in the handoff. In 1999 NASA lost the Mars Climate Orbiter. Not because anyone's work was wrong - two teams each did their part properly. One worked in metric units, the other in imperial, and the mismatch fell in the handoff between them, where no single person owned the whole. Both teams got their own part right. The bit in between was nobody's job, and it fell between the cracks. The mission went off course by a huge distance and burnt up in the atmosphere.

Everyone agreed, so no one questioned it. The Bay of Pigs invasion was signed off by a room full of capable, experienced people who all agreed. That agreement felt like reassurance. It wasn't - everyone deferring to the consensus is not the same as anyone having tested it. A proposal can be unanimous and unchecked at the same time. Which led to a famously disastrous mission.

The team could only see its own area. When Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, he found a sprawling product line - and behind each product, a team that could make a complete, reasonable case for keeping it. Every proposal held up on its own. But each team was looking at its own product, from below the level where the whole line came into view - so none of them could see that the number of products was itself the problem. That was only visible from the top. He cut the range to a handful. The individual cases were sound. The decision lived a level above them.

It answered the brief perfectly, but the brief was too narrow. France's Maginot Line did exactly what it was built to do: an immense, well-engineered defensive line that would have held against the war it was designed for. The army it was meant to stop simply went around it. The work wasn't flawed. The brief was. It answered the question it was set, while the real question had changed underneath it.

None of these failed on effort or competence. They failed on the thing a busy, aligned team is least likely to catch: the part of the decision that sat outside what each person was looking at.

So the question to put to a finished proposal isn't really "is this good work?" - it almost always is. It's "what did the way this was built make it hard to see?" Who wasn't in the room. Which assumption everyone shared. What the brief left out.

⚡ A team can be sure and still be incomplete. The proposal worth a second look is the one nobody in the room had reason to doubt.

🚀 What to do next

If this feels familiar, start here:

👉 Run the Second Look Decision Diagnostic to check your decision
👉Read about checking business decisions

👉 📖 Read more on Second Look blog