BRIEFING PAPERS: Competitive Negotiation Under the Revolutionary FAR Overhaul.

BP26-4_wbox.pdf

In our in-progress research, we discovered that AI tools didn’t reduce work, they consistently intensified it.

Harvard Business Review

The Future Role of the Contracting Officer.pdf

Also check good

UI UX Design course in Tirupur

UI UX Design course in Chennai

We could use a little encouragement, which is why I have made this post and attached to it two of the most inspiring career stories I have ever read.

Attached are the texts of two lectures given to the American Council of Learned Society, both entitled, A Life of Learning. They were parts of the Charles Homer Haskins Lecture series, which have been given each year since 1983. The attached lectures were given by two very great scholars and authors in very different fields. The first was by the late Annemarie Schimmel, who was a scholar of religion, an author, and a professor at Harvard and other universities. The second was by the late Helen Vendler, another Harvard professor and a renowned literary critic, teacher, and author.

I found these two lectures, in which each speaker described her life’s work, to be very inspiring. Neither speaker had been privileged in life. Both worked hard out of a love of learning, dealt with life and career obstacles and setbacks and, in their cases, struggled against academic prejudice against women. (At Harvard, when Vendler was finally admitted as a graduate student, the English department chairman told her, “You know, we don’t want you here... we don’t want any women here.”) Schimmel faced similar discrimination at Harvard. But both pursued what would ultimately be rewarding careers of study, teaching, and writing, because they loved learning.

These and other Life of Learning lectures are freely available at the American Council of Learned Society website: https://www.acls.org/

We in contracting make and manage the administrative and business arrangements needed by the organizations we support to obtain the materials, supplies, systems, services, information (“data”), and construction they need to accomplish their missions. To do that well we, too, must become learned in our field. We must go beyond OJT and official online courses. We must pursue lives of learning.

I was lucky to have been taught by my superiors and colleagues at what was the Air Force Space and Missile Systems Organization (SAMSO), now the Space Force Space Systems Command (SSC), and by Professors Ralph C. Nash and the John Cibinic of The George Washington University. I faced nothing like the challenges faced by Professors Schimmel and Vendler. My greatest challenge was my own immaturity, sloth, and stupidity.

I hope you will read, enjoy, and find inspiration in the stories of these two intrepid, learned, and successful professionals.

What professional challenges they faced and overcame! What professional lives they led!

Haskins_2001_HelenVendler.pdf Haskins_1993_AnnemarieSchimmel.pdf

"Employees are using AI tools to create low-effort, passable looking work that ends up creating more work for their coworkers. On social media, which is increasingly clogged with low-quality AI-generated posts, this content is often referred to as “AI slop.” In the context of work, we refer to this phenomenon as “workslop.” We define workslop as AI generated work content that masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task."

***

"As AI tools become more accessible, workers are increasingly able to quickly produce polished output: well-formatted slides, long, structured reports, seemingly articulate summaries of academic papers by non-experts, and usable code. But while some employees are using this ability to polish good work, others use it to create content that is actually unhelpful, incomplete, or missing crucial context about the project at hand. The insidious effect of workslop is that it shifts the burden of the work downstream, requiring the receiver to interpret, correct, or redo the work. In other words, it transfers the effort from creator to receiver."

***

"When asked about their experience with workslop, one individual contributor in finance described the impact of receiving work that was AI-generated: 'It created a situation where I had to decide whether I would rewrite it myself, make him rewrite it, or just call it good enough. It is furthering the agenda of creating a mentally lazy, slow-thinking society that will become wholly dependant [sic] upon outside forces.'”

https://procurementroundtable.org/#history

https://www.wifcon.com/discussion/uploads/pages_media/NCR_39_8_46_wbox.pdf?_cb=1753899926

https://www.wifcon.com/discussion/uploads/pages_media/NCR_39_6_31wbox.pdf?_cb=1748886086

https://www.wifcon.com/discussion/uploads/pages_media/NCR_39_5_26.pdf?_cb=1746558027

The answer isn't a FAR rewrite. (I might even argue that the FAR can be broken down into small enough pieces in order to be basically manageable.)

As Vern said a dozen times in the first Wifcon podcast (listened to it this morning, well done!), it's about people. Here's Davies at length on people:

"...if you are promising to restore the broken communication channels, you need to say how. These channels used to be made up of layer upon layer of middle managers and civil servants. Not only would it be extremely costly to bring them back, it's not obvious anyone would thank you for doing so. It's definitely not what the populists are proposing--there's no March for Bureaucracy, nobody's slogan is 'Red Tape Holds Us Together.'" (Page 254)

At the current moment, we're reducing the number of 1102s, at a time when the complexity and variety of things we are buying--especially services--is increasing.

Anyone heard of "visual contracts"?

Read this: Assessing the efficacy of visual contracts: an empirical study of transaction costs (2023).

You can access a full pdf here:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00036846.2023.2174942#abstract

Read Part I, Introduction, and Part IV, Conclusions. Parts II and III are technical explanations of the study and the data.

And see this: https://www.icertis.com/research/blog/why-visual-contracting-is-an-emerging-paradigm-in-business/

And this: https://visualcontracts.eu/

And this: https://clearconsultinggroup.co.uk/the-pros-cons-of-diagram-image-based-contracting-agreements-what-works-best-where-there-is-no-common-single-language/

And this: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4944009

There's a lot more. Quite a lot. Interesting.

Quote

Bureaucracy literally means "rule by writing desk." The term was invented in eighteenth century France, when the typical official sat next to a writing desk with drawers--a bureau. At the heart of the bureaucratic order, then, is the drawer. Bureaucracy seeks to solve the retrieval problem by dividing the world into drawers, and knowing which document goes into which drawer.

The principle remains the same regardless of whether the document is placed in a drawer, a shelf, a basket, a jar, a computer folder, or any receptacle: divide and rule. Divide the world into containers, and keep the containers separate so the documents don't get mixed up. This principle, however, comes with a price. Instead of focusing on understanding the world as it is, bureaucracy is often busy imposing a new and artificial order on the world. Bureaucrats begin by inventing various drawers, which are intersubjective realities that don't necessarily correspond to any objective divisions in the world. The bureaucrats then try to force the world to fit into these drawers, and if the fit isn't any good, the bureaucrats push harder.

I see instances of this in acquisition policy: 

1. We need a drawer for "service requirements description," but we instead try to force that into the "supply requirements description" drawer. The result is performance-based contracting (i.e., buying services as if they were supplies).

2. We need a drawer for "evaluating competitive proposals for IDIQ contracts" that recognizes that price competition at the contract level is unnecessary if there will be price competition at the order level. The result is fictional price competitions at the contract level just to check a box.

3. We need a drawer for "software acquisition," but we only have supply drawers and service drawers, so there are debates over which drawer to use.

4. We need a drawer for "evaluation of competitive cost-reimbursement proposals" that recognizes that we are not dealing with fixed prices, but we instead hold cost estimate competitions and make tradeoff decisions as if the Government's determination of probable cost is what the Government will actually pay (without ever validating the accuracy of the probable cost).

Questions:

1. Do you see what I see?

2. If so, are there other examples you can think of?

I am also currently reading Sean Carroll's, Something Deeply Hidden.  Carroll brings up a thought provoking point, which is to say that roughly 45 years after Einstein's publication of his theory of general relativity in 1915 in the journal Annalen der Physik, physicists found themselves grappling with the EPR Paradox, seeking to explain how two electrons could simuteously interact with one another through a state of entanglement regardless of their positions, in violation of the principal of local realism, which establishes that physical bodies cannot communicate with one another faster than the speed of light.  Carroll cites that preoccupation with such questions in the 1960s were regarded within the larger scientific community as ignoble and trivial.  Fast forward to today when we know that the quantum technology that will predictably turn our entire understanding of the world upside down, revolutionizing everything from medicine to computers to the very condition of our existence, was fundamentally based on these questions, which a select few scientists devoted lifetimes to pondering and adding to the incompleteness of theory.  In the 1980s, when I was in secondary school, the occupational pursuits that were seen as guaranteeing one a life of stability and comfort, will soon be overcome and replaced by the products of the quantum science once considered by many a waste of time.  To quote Agnes Callard, “It is true that you can view life as a comedy or a tragedy, but I really think that Socrates thought there’s a third possibility. That is, you can refute things. You can investigate them, never settle on an answer. There’s an inquisitive mode of living, in which you’re living your life at the same time as not assuming you know how to live it.”

Please Read:  Postscript: Following The Rules About Performance Incentives

Key Takeaways and Trends from the Government Accountability Office's Annual Bid Protest Report to.pdf

Pretty funny.  My first FAR: Teaching bureaucracy to children

Quote

Generous amounts of close purposeful reading, rereading, writing, and talking, as underemphasized as they are in K-12 education, are the essence of authentic literacy. These are simple activities are the foundation for a trained, powerful mind. 

See: "4 fundamental practices for cultivating professional literacy"

https://dennissparks.wordpress.com/2014/02/19/4-fundamental-practices-for-cultivating-professional-literacy/

So, what are you reading?

Please read:  Postscript: Simplification, Reform, Streamlining by Vernon J. Edwards

Our Government relies on contracts and contractors and the goods and services they provide, and the protest system is an impediment. It impedes procurement in three ways. First, protests are expensive from the standpoint of total system cost. Second, protests delay procurements, which affects agency operations. Third, fear of protests and attention to protest “case law” stupefies the procurement workforce and encourages them to adopt inefficient procurement practices.

Please Read - Postscript: The Protest Process.