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He called me an "Autodidact"
The Procurement Blueprint - Issue #12
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HEY AGAINSomeone called me an “autodidact” last week.I took it as a compliment and if I’m honest, a fair one. I’ve always had a habit of diving into things first and learning the theory afterwards. During maternity leave, that habit got slightly out of hand. Between naps and bottle prep, I signed up for Harvard’s CS50, a hardcore programming course that explains how algorithms work. I didn’t need it for my job but I wanted to understand the logic behind the tools we all rely on. That decision ended up shaping everything that followed. I then started writing on LinkedIn to make sense of what I was learning, and somehow in a single year, this small experiment turned into a community of nearly 60,000 followers and more than 4,000 subscribers on here! THANK YOU! So this week’s theme, learning by doing, feels fitting. In The Quiet Fix, I’m sharing Stakeholder Gravity: how I stopped chasing and started being pulled in instead. In The Tech Bit, I’m unpacking The Death of Procurement Platforms, when work spreads everywhere except the system. And yes, after last issue’s very honest birthday delay, a promise is a promise, so the Procurement AI Readiness Assessment is finally here!! Built to help you gauge how ready your function truly is for AI, and what to fix first. Let’s get into self-taught habits and all… |  |
In Today's Issue
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The Quiet Fix
STAKEHOLDER GRAVITY
I realise that I have spent an unreasonably large portion of my 20 year career chasing people.
Chasing specs, chasing signatures, chasing that one person who always says, “Lemme just pass it by my director.”
Procurement tends to have a particular kind of optimism based on the firm belief that persistence equals progress. That if we send “just one more polite reminder”, then the world might move a little faster.
But it rarely does.
Years ago when I was a young(er) Head of Procurement, I met a colleague in Brand Marketing who never chased anyone.
She ran brand launches with a similar calm demeanor as she used to order coffee at our on-site cafeteria: brief, precise, slightly amused.
Her desk was a small hurricane of mock-ups and colour swatches, yet everything around her seemed to move on time.
It puzzled me for weeks because she wasn’t louder (not many are!) or more senior than me or even especially available. She just made everything feel “lighter.”
And that was my personal lightbulb moment: influence is gravity.
The more you simplify the orbit around you, the easier it becomes for people to move toward it.
The shift
So I started experimenting.
I replied faster, even when I didn’t have the full answer, I replaced paragraphs of explanation with one clear next step, I stopped quoting our procurement policies like scripture and started talking like a real person again.
Then (like by magic!) something strange slowly started to happen… the same stakeholders who used to dodge my emails began looping me in earlier.
People stopped asking for “procurement approval” and started asking me for my view!
I won’t lie to you, this didn’t happen overnight but it did happen through repetition and tone.
A small fact to anchor this
According to Deloitte’s 2024 CPO Survey, roughly one in five stakeholders describes procurement as easy to work with.
That number measures friction. Ease has gravity. Every reduction in friction (in words, process, or tone) increases pull.
Five habits that created pull instead of push
1. Fast warmth.
Speed matters more than completeness. A short “Got it, I’ll check and come back” tells people they’ve been heard.
2. Clarity disguised as simplicity.
I started saying things like, “Here are three options that get you there,” instead of “We’ll begin sourcing next week.” The first creates certainty whilst the second sounds like delay.
3. Language that breathes.
Policies can exist in documents. Conversations should sound like air rather than admin.
4. The small archive of help.
I kept a small list of moments from when I fixed something for someone: a contract draft, a pricing issue, a call that calmed a panic. Not to boast at all, just to remind myself that progress is mostly invisible work.
5. The metric of ease.
After every big project, I ask one stakeholder a simple question: “Was this easier than you expected?” It’s remarkable how often that opens a real conversation about what actually works.
The quiet fix
Procurement leadership often gets described as strategic alignment, value creation, transformation… I think it’s something a bit harder: the discipline of removing friction.
The more you simplify how people work with you, the more they return.
That gravity is subtle, human, and entirely earned.
I still chase occasionally but a lot less than I used to. These days the work tends to come looking for me.
And when it does, I like learning from people who think just as deeply about how procurement actually works.
One of them is my friend Joël, who writes Pure Procurement.
His deep dives into procure-tech are always some of the sharpest I’ve ever read. I read every issue, mostly because it reminds me that technology done well still has heart.
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The Tech Bit
THE DEATH OF PLATFORM
I find the word “platform” faintly tragic.
In Procurement Technology, it used to represent a rather comforting idea that if we could just get everyone into one place then we might finally stop losing track of things.
But lately, I have slowly started noticing that the “place” doesn’t exist anymore.
Approvals happen in Teams.
Specs are shared in Slack.
Clauses are written in Word and redlined by someone’s AI copilot.
So when your “official” system wakes up, the decision has already happened and all it’s left to do is document it.
I call this an “adaptation.”
The first rule of tech design is this: People work where it’s easiest.
According to Ardent Partners’ 2025 CPO Rising report, nearly 70% of procurement teams now use four or more digital tools to complete a single sourcing process.
Four!
But some people in the industry still cling to the dream of the next big platform.
“One ring to rule them all.”
They do with on the premise of fighting the ever-present fragmentation. But I am believer that fragmentation is actually evolution.
Work no longer wants to be centralised but to flow.
Which leaves procurement in an awkward spot between structure and entropy.
We can’t put the toothpaste back in the portal, but we also can’t pretend audit trails don’t matter.
So what do you do when work refuses to stay in one system?
You stop trying to drag it back. You design around it.
Here’s where to start:
1. Follow the real path.
Pick one category and trace a transaction end-to-end. Watch where it actually happens. Half of it will be outside your system. That’s fine. Knowing it’s half the fix.
2. Make governance portable.
Policies written for portals are useless in chat threads. Replace them with simple, universal principles: who decides, who checks, who records.
3. Stop measuring compliance by login.
People doing the right thing in the wrong place are still doing the right thing. Design your oversight to recognise intent, not clicks.
4. Shrink your rulebook.
The smaller the rules, the harder they are to ignore.
Platforms truly are dissolving quietly into the everyday tools people already use.
The smart teams will keep order while everything else moves.
Procurement really does not need yet another bigger system. What we truly need is better choreography.
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My Best Post Lately
RFP vs RFS
So apparently, I killed the RFP.
Or that is what half the comments under my post seemed to think.
For the record, I didn’t. I just reintroduced its slightly cooler, older cousin called the Request for Solution (RFS).
Let me clarify that the RFS isn’t a new idea, despite the way it’s suddenly being treated like that.
It’s been living a long quiet life in engineering and IT for decades and used by teams who design satellites, build data centres, or solve problems you can’t exactly fit into a template.
It started in industries where the buyer couldn’t define the answer because the answer didn’t exist yet.
Think NASA, telecoms, and early software development… where “requirements” were more educated guesses than fixed specs.
Procurement outside those fields just ignored it for years. Until now, when our own projects started looking more like theirs in terms of how messy, technical, half innovation, half improvisation they have become.
That’s why I belive that the RFS suddenly matters again.
It was created for those situations when you don’t know exactly what you want, but you know the outcome you need.
So, no, of course the RFP isn’t dead. It’s just been joined by an older sibling who’s better at open-ended conversations.
And if you missed the post (and the heated philosophical debate that followed), you can read it below.
Free Template(s) of the week
MY PROCUREMENT AI READINESS TOOLKIT
I’ve been sitting on something for a while and I’m actually proud of this one.
Here’s how it happened…
I’d been working with Tim and Clemens over at Zalion (yes, that Zalion), the company building AI agents that handle sourcing, order-confirmations and tail-spend negotiation for many large procurement teams.
I’ve watched them go from idea to live agents in just weeks and I’ve been impressed by how fast they turn insight into output.
Tim read my draft of the kit and sent back a message that made me grin:
“Hi Tanya,
Thanks so much for the reminder and the opportunity to review your assessment. I love the framework; it touches on almost all the important areas that we see daily. …”
(He also flagged some areas where I’d gone too broad: “Simplify where possible to really focus on AI readiness vs. a more holistic ‘procurement maturity’ framework.”)
Fair point. So I made a decision.
Instead of stripping the kit back to only AI readiness, I kept the broader maturity questions too.
Why, you may ask me? Because you and I both know that being ready for AI is moot unless the foundation (data, process, governance) is already standing. So this kit is both: “Are you ready for AI?” and “Are you ready to transform?”, exactly the dual reality I live in with you.
What you’ll find in the toolkit:
A structured checklist of readiness dimensions
A scoring matrix so you can see where you stand
A roadmap of what to fix first (yes, small things matter)
Insights from real-world agency + vendor work (thanks Tim)
My unapologetic preference for practical over perfect
Let me be clear: if your team is still fighting approval loops, missing data or unclear ownership, the fanciest agent in the world is not going to save you!
Grab your copy now (link below) - it’s free for this batch of readers for the next 4 days.
And yes, when the margaritas subside and the cake is gone, I might get the pure AI Readiness version out too.
Until then, this one. Use it, prod it, adapt it, share it. Then tell me what you found.
A Final Note
This week’s quote comes from the writer Ray Bradbury:
“Learning to let go should be learned before learning to get.”
I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately because our industry is full of people trying to “get”.
Trying to get more systems, more data, more control...
But I refuse to do so because most real progress starts with the opposite, which is letting go.
Letting go of chasing, of perfect workflows, of the idea that influence lives inside a platform.
The older I get the more convinced I am that the real skill in modern procurement is subtraction.
Removing friction, simplifying language, trusting that people usually want to do the right thing if you make it easy enough.
Maybe that’s what being an autodidact really means. Learning by unlearning.
See you in two weeks, hopefully with fewer browser tabs open and another lesson learned the hard way.
Until next time,
Procurement worth reading.