LESSONS FROM THE WIN ROOM - EPISODE 1
It's getting people to do it.
Shipleywins' Sam Singh chats with Forbes McKay, who has spent more than 30 years in business development & led a multi-year transformation of how CGI UK approaches bidding & client work.
In the first Lessons from the Win Room, he gets into what actually made that transformation work – and what didn't.
Hosted bySam SinghManaging Partner, Shipleywins
The guest
VP Consulting Services, CGI
More than 30 years in business development, from writing proposals on paper to leading major business development transformation.
LinkedIn profileThree questions from the conversation
01
Forbes on the knowing-doing gap, and why understanding the theory is rarely the hardest part of transformation.
Most commercial teams can already describe a better way to pursue work. The distance between that description and daily behaviour is where transformation is actually won or lost.
02
How CGI created initial buy-in without making the approach mandatory, and built internal advocates and coaches who carried it further than any policy could.
And: where bottom-up transformation eventually reaches its limits.
03
Forbes' analogy: AI-generated proposal content can be like artificial flavouring – convincing, but not quite the real thing when a client is deciding whether they trust you.
Where CGI is finding genuine value from AI, and where it deliberately keeps humans in the loop.
Five lessons from the Win Room
The full conversation
Forbes talks candidly about the realities of changing business development behaviour at scale, what CGI learned along the way, and how AI is beginning to change proposal development.
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