Winning the Extractive Project Before the Bid Begins
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▦ OPINION | Arno Saffran, Thu 03 Nov, 2025A new framework for securing competitive advantage in the age of complex consent.
For decades, success perceived in extractive industries has been measured by technical capability and capital efficiency. The lowest-cost engineering design winning the project. This was the universal understanding of market competition—a contest played on a defined field with clear rules. You should understand that those conventions have never been the reality.
In fact, the decisive contest occurs in a parallel arena, governed by tacit rules and won with different capabilities. This is the arena of ‘non-market strategy’—the integrated management of relationships with governments, communities, NGOs, and civil society.
As foundational research by scholars like David P. Baron established, a firm’s total strategy must seamlessly integrate both market and non-market components to succeed in regulated, high-stakes sectors. The critical insight for business development leaders is this: the non-market contest is not won during the formal tender process. It is won—or lost—in the 18 to 24 months prior, in what we term the Pre-RFP Timeline. This silent phase is where the foundations of victory are laid, long before the request for proposals is ever issued.
The Pre-RFP Timeline
The formal bid process is the public culmination of a lengthy campaign. To treat it as the starting point is a catastrophic strategic error. The Pre-RFP Timeline is characterised by four pivotal activities:
First, Stakeholder Mapping & Coalition-Building. Identifying not just the official decision-makers, but the full ecosystem of influence—from regulatory bodies and local political figures to community elders and activist networks. Success depends on building a coalition of aligned interests that will support the project’s social and political legitimacy.
Second, Regulatory & Policy Foresight. By anticipating shifts in the legal and regulatory landscape, and engaging constructively to help shape frameworks that enable sustainable development. This is not lobbying in a narrow sense, but contributing technical and commercial expertise to the policymaking process.
Third, Social License Engineering. Moving beyond transactional CSR to design a project’s benefits and mitigations in genuine partnership with host communities, establishing trust and resilience against future opposition.
Fourth, Strategic Narrative Shaping. By defining the project’s value proposition in terms that resonate with national and local priorities—job creation, skills transfer, energy security, economic diversification—embedding it within the host nation’s own strategic narrative. These are not the tasks of a conventional sales team. They are the domain of the Non-Market Strategist.
The Non-Market Strategist
The individual who leads this silent campaign is a hybrid business developer. They have the deep commercial acumen, but their primary currency is trust, their primary tool is dialogue, and their primary output is aligned consent.
They are as comfortable in a ministry boardroom as in a community meeting. Their profile is distinct. They require Cultural & Political Fluency: an intuitive understanding of the host environment’s power structures, customs, and unspoken rules.
They must possess Integrative Negotiation Skill: the ability to find and architect mutually beneficial outcomes across diverse stakeholder groups, reconciling commercial imperatives with public goods. They operate with Proactive Foresight, a bias for early engagement, identifying and mitigating non-technical risks before they become crises or deal-breaking conditions in a tender. And they must be a Credible Convener, possessing the personal authority to bring disparate, often conflicting, parties to the table and facilitate durable agreements.
This person you need in-country and interfacing with the people that matter pre-FEED does not manage government affairs or handle community relations They execute the non-market component of integrated strategy, ensuring that by the time the commercial tender is launched, the project is already perceived as the most legitimate, stable, and aligned option.
Positioning for the Nascent Phase
For CEOs and board directors, the implication is clear: competitive advantage in major projects is now a function of human capital deployed during the Pre-RFP Timeline. The question is not merely “Do we have the technical solution?” but “Have we positioned the individual who can secure the operational environment for that solution to succeed?”
This requires a fundamental shift in talent strategy. It means valuing non-market capability as a core leadership competency, on par with financial or operational leadership. It requires investing in the silent phase, dedicating senior resources and granting strategic patience to the long-term, relationship-heavy work that precedes any formal bid.
Ultimately, it demands strategic recruitment: seeking out and empowering those rare leaders whose careers demonstrate a proven ability to navigate complexity, build bridges, and create the conditions for commercial success in fraught environments.
Bid Architecture
The extractive industry’s future belongs not to the best bidders, but to the best builders—of relationships, of trust, and of aligned strategic vision. The formal RFP is the final sprint in a marathon run during the Pre-RFP Timeline. Firms that master this integrated approach, who position the right non-market strategist to lead the silent campaign, will find that tenders become confirmations of a pre-established consensus. Those that do not will continue to submit brilliant technical proposals into a political and social void, wondering why they consistently finish second.
The work of winning the project begins not when the invitation arrives, but when the strategic decision is made to enter a territory. Everything that follows in that silent, crucial period determines everything that follows in the public, competitive one.
References:
Baron David P., Business and Its Environment (Englewood Cliffs, NJ; Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1993); Marcus Alfred, Kaufman Allen M., Beam David R., eds., Business Strategy and Public Policy (New York, NY: Quorum Books, 1987); Preston Lee E., Post James E., Private Management and Public Policy (Englewood Cliffs, NJ; Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1975); Shipper Frank, Jennings Marianne M., Business Strategy for the Political Arena (Westport, CT: Quorum Books, 1984); Weidenbaum Murray L., Business, Government, and the Public, 4th edition (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, Inc., 1990); Yoffie David B., “Corporate Strategies for Political Action,” in Marcus, Kaufman, Beam, op. cit., pp. 43–60; Yoffie David B., “How an Industry Builds Political Advantage,” Harvard Business Review (May/June 1988), pp. 82–89.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)
— Arno Saffran
Arno developed his approach through roles in client development (KPMG) and strategic commercial engagement (affiliated with advisories including Hakluyt), focusing on complex industrial and energy sectors.
VSG works across the extractive value chain, positioning people who form the critical bridge to early-stage relationships and commercial access in complex markets.
