A Lesson Learned from a Poor Proposal

            The primary purpose of a proposal is to persuade.  When we address an audience with our proposal we are attempting the audience “to take some form of action” (Lannon, 2008, p. 495).  The actions that we need the audience to take will vary by the subject of the proposal but we need to approach each proposal the same; with the purpose to try to encourage our audience to do something or make some sort of change.

             I feel that I have to do a lot of “informal” proposals at work.  I have to convince my employees to adapt to change or to do certain tasks certain ways.  Most of the time it is to make their job easier but it can sometimes be hard for them to see that, so it is my job to convince them that it is.  A couple of years back I had to give a proposal to a group of my peers on the way my boss would like all of us to do a certain task.  I do not believe that I persuaded everyone to do the task the way that he asked it to be done; it was a tough crowd and they are not always willing to change.

               This was my first real proposal in front of a crowd and I did not have a lot of time to prepare.  Looking back I can see what I should have done differently.  The first thing is that I would have had a more convincing language.  The problem was that I was not completely convinced myself when I had to make the proposal.  I myself had not tried out the new way to do the task.  The next thing that would have done differently is that I would have had visual aids in the form of hand outs.  This was not an all around bad experience though; I did learn from my mistakes. 

References

Lannon, J. (2008). Techincal Communication. New York: Pearson.