Most proposal teams write one draft and refine it. They wordsmith paragraphs, tighten the formatting, maybe strengthen a section or two. But they almost never question the fundamental strategy — the opening angle, the core argument, the narrative structure. Those get locked in early.
We built PropFill around a different idea: generate three strategically different proposals from every upload and let the user compare them side by side. Before writing a single line of code, we spent time understanding why this approach works. The answer turned out to be well-documented in decision science research — and it changed how we thought about the entire product.
Half of All Decisions Fail — And It Is Usually the Process
Paul Nutt, a management sciences professor at Ohio State University, spent over two decades studying more than 400 real organizational decisions. His conclusion was striking: roughly half of all business decisions end in failure. Not because the people were incompetent, but because of how they structured the decision process itself.
The most common blunder? Rushing to a single solution and then defending it. Nutt found that when managers committed to one approach early and invested resources into refining it, they became psychologically anchored to that choice. Alternative approaches were never seriously explored, even when they might have been superior.
This pattern maps perfectly onto how most proposal teams work. You debate the strategy in a kickoff meeting, pick one angle, and spend the next two weeks polishing it. If the evaluator wanted something different, you never find out. You just lose.
Generating Three Options Changes the Game
Nutt's research found that decision quality improves significantly when decision-makers generate multiple distinct options before choosing. Not variations on the same idea — genuinely different strategic approaches. The parking garage example from his work illustrates this well: instead of "should we build a parking garage or not," a better decision process asks "should we build a parking garage, give employees bus passes, or offer remote work days?" Three options that solve the same problem from completely different angles.
Research at Ohio State found that generating at least three options markedly improves the quality of the final decision. The reason is structural: when you have three options, you stop defending a position and start evaluating a landscape. You notice tradeoffs you would have missed. You find hybrid approaches that combine the best elements of each.
In the proposal context, this means you stop asking "is this draft good enough?" and start asking "which of these three strategies best fits this evaluator?"
You Cannot Evaluate What You Cannot Compare
Christopher Hsee at the University of Chicago has spent decades studying what he calls the "evaluability hypothesis." His core finding: people judge the quality of options very differently depending on whether they evaluate them in isolation or side by side.
When you evaluate a single option alone, you focus on whether it clears some baseline threshold — is it good enough? When you evaluate multiple options simultaneously, you naturally identify the dimensions where they differ and you gravitate toward the strongest performer on the dimensions that matter most.
This has a direct parallel in proposal writing. When a team reviews their single draft, they ask "does this section work?" The answer is almost always "yes, with some edits." But when the same team sees three versions of the same section — one leading with ROI numbers, another mapping point-by-point to the RFP requirements, another opening with the client's core challenge — they immediately see which approach is strongest for that specific evaluator.
Simultaneous comparison activates a mode of thinking that sequential refinement simply cannot reach. Research from Nanyang Technological University confirmed this experimentally: participants presented with options simultaneously made significantly better choices than those who evaluated the same options one at a time.
Single-Option Aversion Is Real
There is even research suggesting that evaluators themselves prefer having options to compare. Daniel Mochon's 2013 research on "single-option aversion" found that people are measurably less likely to commit to a choice when only one option is presented. Adding a second or third option — even when those options are not ultimately selected — increases confidence in the final decision and satisfaction with the outcome.
This matters for proposal writing in a way most teams overlook. The team that submits one proposal is betting everything on one angle. The team that internally evaluates three approaches and submits the strongest one has made a fundamentally better-informed bet. They are not guessing which strategy fits the evaluator — they have compared the alternatives and selected with confidence.
How This Shaped Our Product
When we started building PropFill, we did not set out to make a "faster" proposal tool. There are plenty of those. We wanted to solve the strategic problem — the fact that teams commit to one approach without ever seeing the alternatives.
The product generates three versions of every proposal, each built around a different strategic lens:
- Impact opens with your strongest measurable result and works backward to methodology.
- Precision maps every RFP requirement to a specific, traceable response.
- Story starts with the client's challenge and builds an empathy-first narrative.
The user uploads their RFP and their own template (DOCX or PPTX), and the system fills every section three times. Then they compare. Usually, the winning proposal is not any single version — it is a mix. The executive summary from Impact, the technical approach from Precision, the project timeline from Story.
This "mix and match" behavior is exactly what the decision science research predicts. When you see three options, you do not just pick one — you identify the strongest elements across all of them and combine.
What We Learned Building This Way
Three things surprised us as we brought this to users:
1. People spend more time on strategy, less on wordsmithing. When you have three versions to compare, the conversation shifts from "should we rephrase this sentence?" to "which argument is more compelling for this audience?" That is a higher-value conversation.
2. Three is the right number. We tested with two, three, and five options. Two feels like a coin flip — there is not enough differentiation to trigger genuine strategic thinking. Five causes analysis paralysis. Three consistently hits the sweet spot where comparison is productive without being overwhelming.
3. The "loser" drafts are still valuable. Teams often pull a paragraph or a framing device from the version they did not choose. The drafts that "lost" contribute to the draft that wins. This is exactly the hybrid-creation behavior that Nutt's research predicts when people have access to multiple alternatives.
The Uncomfortable Implication
If the research is right — and two decades of Paul Nutt's data and decades of evaluability research suggest it is — then every team submitting a single-draft proposal is making a structurally weaker decision than they need to.
Not because their writing is bad. Not because their team is inexperienced. But because they are evaluating their work in isolation, where the evaluability hypothesis tells us they cannot see its relative strengths and weaknesses. They are committing to one strategy without comparing alternatives, which Nutt's research says fails roughly half the time.
The fix is not to write three times as much. It is to see three approaches before picking one. The comparison itself is the intervention that improves the outcome.
PropFill generates three AI-powered proposals from a single upload — your template, your format, three strategic lenses. First proposal is free, no credit card required.
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