Procurement isn't broken. It's out of date.
Thinking formed in practice, published as part of the Bearing & Course Points of View library.
Large organisations are among the most significant buyers of technology in the economies they operate in. In some sectors and some markets, the buying decisions of a handful of major organisations shape which firms can scale, which capabilities develop locally and how an industry participates in the broader digital economy. Procurement does more than allocate contracts. It is, in practice, industrial policy: whether treated that way or not.
Conversations about procurement reform have a familiar quality. They have surfaced regularly for more than a decade in strategy documents, leadership reviews and conference programmes. Frameworks have been updated. Thresholds have shifted. The core of the system, calibrated primarily for assurance and defensibility, has remained largely unchanged. The settings were designed for a different environment, one where certainty was achievable, timelines were predictable and technology changed slowly enough that locking scope upfront was a reasonable approach. That environment no longer exists.
Three parties within most procurement ecosystems experience this gap in materially different ways. Delivery leaders are accountable for outcomes and expected to move at pace while managing risk. Procurement and legal functions are accountable for defensibility and process compliance. Vendors operate in commercial frameworks where risk and burden sit heavily on their side: committing resources up front in pursuit of opportunities, under terms that assume predictability in conditions defined by change. Each position is rational. The friction emerges in how they intersect.
Tighten controls in the name of defensibility and decision cycles lengthen. Demand price certainty upfront and the ability to iterate narrows. Optimise for process compliance and pace becomes the casualty. Nobody is acting in bad faith. The friction is built into the design of the system.
For smaller firms, the cost of participating in a formal procurement is not just time. It is working capital, it is leadership attention, and it is opportunity cost against building the product or delivering for existing clients. Larger organisations absorb this friction through dedicated bid infrastructure. Smaller ones step back. The result is predictable. Participation narrows to those with the scale to absorb the process overhead. Innovation concentrates in the hands of established players.
Procurement is not broken. It is functioning as designed. If the outcomes produced over many years include concentration, slower cycle times and constrained participation by emerging and mid-tier firms, those outcomes are not anomalies. They are the product of deliberate design choices that have accumulated over time.
Probity and performance are not in opposition. Integrity and agility can coexist. Transparency and speed can reinforce rather than undermine each other when the process is proportional, consistent and genuinely focused on the outcome being sought rather than the defensibility of the process itself.
The system will produce exactly what it is designed to produce. The question is whether the design has kept pace with what is actually needed.