Darwinian Difficulty

There’s all sorts of wonderfully produced BBC documentaries celebrating Darwin’s 200th birthday and the 150th anniversary of his Origin of the Species publication.

One such programme focused on what Darwin did not know at the time, and pondered whether it added or subtracted from his proposition.

One base for the academic fronting the show was Chapter Six: Difficulties of the Theory.

Given his own upbringing and the legion of religious zealots bound to pounce on his (r)evolutionary, natural selection ideas, he decided to confront head-on those most likely to pour scorn on his writings.

It appears a masterstroke. At once both disarmingly transparent and aggressively dismissive.

I instantly recalled a couple of meetings where I myself have been the vendor and (always a techie the other side of the table) I’ve been asked something ugly like, “what makes such a project fail?”

In both Business and Sales Plans that I’m asked to write, I typically create a page around Risk Assessment & Mitigation. I wonder how a page in a pre-proposal kind of doc might go down that talks solely about why such implementation of solution sales proposals can fail, and use it to garner buy-in for success?