Victory and Defeat: Sometimes You Eat the Bear…Sometimes the Bear Eats You

I was thinking of this piece before Aaron Rodgers kicked his bobbled ball into the hands of the Cardinals linebacker, losing the Packers first playoff game since 2007.  The look on Rodgers’ face said it all — oh, to have gotten this far – within yards of winning – and then lose everything.  The Packers will be fine.  We’re not worried about them.  They’ll watch the film, cash their checks and be comforted by groupies, wives, and sportscasters.  It’ll all be fine.

But what about you?  What happened the last time you lost?  When people in the nonprofit or government world talk about losing, they’re usually referring to not winning an important grant.  People have interesting reactions to not getting a big grant.  In my experience, the most common is that people never discuss the grant again.  It’s almost as if the grant committed suicide and the stigma is so great that no one feels it appropriate to mention its name.  Hardly ever do people sit down and do an honest and thorough debriefing about why they didn’t win.  I’m not criticizing anyone.  I don’t like to do this either.  It’s difficult, tiresome, and depressing – but, alas, necessary if you’re going to win in the future.

If you failed to win a big grant recently, sit down and think about these three possibilities. 

First of all, there is a likelihood that your grant simply was not good enough.  It may have been on the right track, had the right ingredients and partners, but just didn’t score high enough to be funded.  This means that in order to win next time you will have to pick apart the scoring, examing the point allocation and the comments.  You will have to see exactly where you lost points and figure out how to gain them back next time.  If you don’t do this you will absolutely repeat your mistake for this reason: when you wrote the grant the first time, you wrote to your strengths.  Unless you critically dissect the scoring, you will do the same thing again with the same results.

Second,  you may have made a serious strategic error.  This isn’t a problem of not writing a good enough grant proposal.  A mistake of this magnitude means that you went to Brazil when the funder told you to go the France.  Said another way, your lack of regard for the funder’s priorities put you out of the game from the jump.  The irony here is that you could write a suberb grant proposal in this situation and get tossed into the wastebasket at the first review.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sat with people (after the fact) who’ve made a serious strategic error on a grant proposal that was frighteningly obvious – picture a big scary clown face in the middle of the page – and they make the argument that the funder ‘just doesn’t understand what they are trying to do.’  Biggest reason this happens?  No one wants to take responsibility for the mistake.  Frankly, arrogance keeps some grantwriters from really listening to funders’ priorities and arrogance keeps them from accepting responsibility for the bad results.

Last, you can lose a big grant because of the luck of the draw.  A good friend of mine wrote the #1 scoring grant proposal in the country but it didn’t get funded because of political/geographical/who knows what else concerns that federal department had at the moment.  Granted this is a very rare occurrence but the takeaway is that you can write a really great proposal – maybe even one that is superior to hundreds of others – and still not get funded. Luck of the draw is a factor.  What if the Cardinals had won the coin toss?  (They would have won the game sooner.)

This is my point.  You lose a major grant.  Don’t bury it without a funeral.  Make yourself sit down with your colleagues and talk it through. Don’t let anyone, including yourself, quickly take all the responsibility and the blame.  Review, analyze, and discuss and figure out how to make those final 10 yards to score next time.