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Proposal Land

More Advice on ChatGPT

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No, not my advice: that of a professor of science who also teaches scientific writing.

What happens when ChatGPT
writes an entire scientific paper?

I suspect that his caveats on the use of ChatGPT in scientific papers apply equally to proposals. In case you don’t have the time or interest to read the whole thing, here are the highlights:

  • ChatGPT requires lots of human input–prompts, guidance, judgement–to generate even marginally usable writing.
  • ChatGPT makes stuff up: not maliciously, but precisely because it’s programmed to fill gaps with plausible (or, perhaps, “right sounding”) bits. In science papers that’s often fake citations: proposal teams can look forward to fake experience examples or performance results.
  • ChatGPT delivers pedestrian science (in his example) precisely because it’s aping existing text and repeating existing hypotheses. For the same reason, you can expect it to deliver pedestrian solutions for a client’s requirement. Just as there’s no new science being done here, there’s no business/operational creativity on offer here either.
  • ChatGPT replicates all the bad habits of science writers, including the passive voice and tortuous sentences and paragraphs. It would do the same for proposal writers, presumably. Oh, hurray.

So, how could you use ChatGPT in Proposal Land? Read this.

 

Working with Intent

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We make heroes out of people who show up with the last-minute save,
but the real work is in not needing the last minute.
– Seth’s Blog

I’ve written a few times on this blog (and on every page of my manual) about proposal management as a project-management discipline; in Seth’s words today, about how not to need the last minute in Proposal Land:

It isn’t that we don’t know what has to happen in theory, it’s just that it’s, you know, a lot like *work* to make it happen in reality. I agree: It *is* a lot of work. But I don’t sympathize with attempts to ignore/avoid it: It’s still the best option we have.

The good news? We can learn how to do it.

And it’s helpful to realize that it’s a skill, a choice,
a set of tools to be learned, not something we’re born with.
Very few successful organizations feel as though
they’ve underinvested in project management.
By the time a project is worth doing,
it’s worth doing with intent.
– also/still Seth’s Blog

 

How to Use a Watermelon

 

Now retired from Proposal Land, I have hesitated to advise folks on how to deal with all this new-fangled technology since I have no first-hand experience with it. But here’s a great piece on how to use ChatGPT to expedite/improve scientific writing from someone who does have that experience, albeit in a different context.

The correlations with proposal writing are obvious. There are three good applications:

  • To create a first draft from bullets and an outline that you wrote
  • To polish a draft you wrote (copy-editing the grammar and syntax [word order])
  • To suggest ways to shorten or re-order a passage or make it less awkward

That sounds a lot like some of the elements of proposal editing. Maybe ChatGPT can free editors to focus more on adding marketing value.

And how not to use ChatGPT?

So: never use ChatGPT to generate content.

Don’t ask it for information; the results are meaningless, even if it purports to back up its claims with citations.

Using ChatGPT to generate content is like using a watermelon to do a jigsaw puzzle.

It’s not even a poor tool for that – it isn’t a tool for that at all.

 

Here’s a Useful Thought: Grids

 

Seth’s post today is nominally about using the power of a grid–course, dish–to get a complete grocery list for a complex dinner party.

He’s used this metaphor before, and I had the same reaction to it then: *This* is the highest value that editors/reviewers add.

. . . the biggest contribution editing makes to proposal writing is actually this: Creating the grid and, by doing so, highlighting the empty boxes.

Technical experts often don’t see their field in simple chunks: Their framework is implicit, not explicit. They see all the glorious detail. They’ve been so into it for so long that the detail doesn’t overwhelm them, and they take the relationships for granted: so much so that they can have trouble articulating them. That’s where a less-informed reader can help, by identifying the major elements, as it were.

The whole post is worth a few minutes of your time. The tool, used with discipline, is worth its weight.

Here’s a Happy Thought: Constraints

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Seth’s blog today is titled: Boundaries are levers. He goes on . . .

And assertions are maps.
Which means that:
     Budgets
     Timelines
     Plans
     Decision trees
     and projections
are nothing to be afraid of.
They’re a gift.
They give us the chance to act as if,
to describe a possible future
and then to lean against them as we work to create the place we seek to be.

Ah, timelines. Or, in Proposal Land, the schedules we love to hate. Yeah no.

The schedule is the only thing standing between us and perfectionists. Between us as we want to be and us being that perfectionist.

The schedule is the only thing that allows this seemingly never-ending and ridiculous effort to find an end.

The schedule is the only thing that forces us to think about what matters: in our solution to meet the client’s stated/unstated needs and in our proposal to present that solution.

So go ahead: Lean against that schedule. It really is a gift. You’ll also be in some great company.