The STARS Framework: Know Which Situation You're In Before You Lead It

Have you heard of the STARS framework?

If your mind went straight to Situation, Task, Action, Result, nope, not that one. That’s STAR, the technique for structuring interview answers.

I’m talking about the STARS framework from Michael D. Watkins’ book, The First 90 Days. It’s built for anyone stepping into something new: new executives, managers and project leads, or a team taking on a new project or going through a business transition. Its five letters describe the five situations you might walk into:

• 🏗️ S – Start-up
• 🚑 T – Turnaround
• 📈 A – Accelerated growth
• 🧭 R – Realignment
• 🌱 S – Sustaining success

The idea is simple. Before you decide how to lead, work out which situation you’re in. Once you’ve diagnosed the state of the organisation or project, you can tailor your strategy, your leadership style and your 90-day plan to fit it. The playbook that worked in your last role can fail badly in the next one if the situation is different.

The framework is usually taught at the level of a whole business. I’ll cover that first, then show how each situation plays out somewhere closer to the ground: a bid desk.

The five situations: invert, always invert

Charlie Munger (Warren Buffett’s number 2) liked to say: “Invert, always invert.” Don’t only ask how to succeed. Ask yourself what would guarantee failure, then avoid it. Each STARS situation fails in its own way, so each one below comes with a question to ask yourself and a trap to avoid.

🏗️ Start-up — Build

You’re assembling something from nothing: a new venture, product, team, function, or even a new project. Nothing exists yet, which is both the problem and the gift. Energy and hope are high, but there’s no structure, no track record, and usually not enough money or people.

Ask yourself: “What do we need to build from the ground up?”

Avoid: Trying to do everything at once, or building so much structure and plan that you never actually launch. You need absolute focus on a few things, and just enough structure to stop the chaos.

🚑 Turnaround — Stabilise & fix

The unit is in serious trouble and everyone knows it. Morale is low, the best people may already be leaving, and the clock is ticking. The gift here is the mandate: because the crisis is visible, you have permission to act decisively in a way you’d never get elsewhere. Speed matters more than consensus.

Diagnose → Stop the bleeding → Focus resources → Make tough decisions → Rebuild confidence

Ask yourself: “What has to change immediately to stop the decline?”

Avoid: Waiting for perfect information while the decline continues, or carrying on like a turnaround leader after the crisis has passed.

📈 Accelerated growth — Scale

The business works, and now it has to scale. You’re adding people, systems and structure fast, and the danger is that the thing that made you successful breaks under load: hiring quality slips, culture dilutes, and processes that were fine at 20 people collapse at 200.

Ask yourself: “How do we scale without destroying what’s already working?”

Avoid: Assuming that what worked at £1m will still work at £10m.

🧭 Realignment — Diagnose & change

The unit looks successful but is drifting toward trouble. Sales are still fine and the awards are still on the wall, but the market is quietly moving away underneath. Think of it as a slow puncture rather than a blown tyre.

Watkins treats this as one of the hardest situations, and the reason is denial. You have capable people, resources and a bit of runway, but no mandate, because almost nobody believes there’s a problem. Your first job isn’t fixing anything; it’s building a shared understanding that something needs fixing.

Ask yourself: “How do I create enough shared understanding that people recognise the need to change, before we reach turnaround?”

Avoid: Charging in and declaring everything broken when people don’t believe it is. You create resistance rather than momentum, and you become the outsider who doesn’t understand what makes this place special.

🌱 Sustaining success — Protect & renew

You’ve inherited a healthy, high-performing unit, often from a respected predecessor. The team’s fine, the numbers are fine, and you’re standing in the shadow of someone people liked. The real work is finding the next source of growth before the current engine runs out, without destabilising the engine you have.

Ask yourself: “What must we preserve, and what must we reinvent or to continuous improve?”

Avoid: Changing things you don’t yet understand because you want to make your mark, or protecting the existing model so aggressively that the organisation eventually becomes irrelevant.

Applying STARS to bids and tenders

If you work in bids, proposals or tendering, the “unit” you’re diagnosing is your bid desk, the quality of your technical offers, and the relationship between proposals, sales and execution. Here’s how each situation shows up day to day.

🏗️ Start-up

You’re standing up a proposals capability where none existed. Maybe the company sold standard product and is now bidding engineered solutions. Maybe it’s a new region or vertical, or the founder or technical director was doing quotes personally and it no longer scales. Nothing exists: no template, no costing model, no bid/no-bid rules, no historical win data, no vendor pricing agreements. Everyone is enthusiastic, and nobody knows what a good offer looks like yet.

The trap is building a beautiful process nobody uses. The work is winning something quickly and honestly, then hardening what worked into a reusable skeleton: one solid technical offer template, one costing sheet that ties to actual vendor quotes, and a rough rule for which enquiries you’ll even respond to.

🚑 Turnaround

The signs are unmistakable and everybody in the room knows it. Win rate has collapsed. Or worse, you’re winning and losing money, which shows up as a persistent gap between as-sold and as-executed margin. Projects is openly hostile because they keep inheriting scope gaps and undersized equipment. Bids go out late, or don’t go out at all. Clarification lists come back enormous because the offers are vague. Good application engineers have already left, and the ones remaining are firefighting.

You have a mandate here, so use it. Stop bidding everything: a brutal bid/no-bid filter is often the single highest-leverage move, because a demoralised team bidding 80 tenders at a 6% hit rate is destroying itself for nothing. Audit the last dozen lost bids and the last dozen won-but-underperforming ones, because those two lists usually tell the whole story. And fix costing accuracy before you fix presentation.

📈 Accelerated growth

Enquiry volume is climbing faster than your ability to respond. This is the most common situation for a healthy applications team, and it’s deceptively dangerous because it looks like success. The symptoms: turnaround times stretching, engineers copying the last similar offer without re-checking the selection, technical review skipped because there’s no time, and one or two senior people becoming bottlenecks because only they can size the difficult stuff.

The work is industrialisation: configurators and selection tools, pre-approved vendor pricing, a modular technical offer library, tiered review (a £50k repeat order shouldn’t get the same scrutiny as a £5m first-of-a-kind), and deliberate capability-building so knowledge isn’t trapped in two heads. Protect quality control precisely when volume tempts you to drop it.

🧭 Realignment

This is the subtle one and, in tendering, an extremely common one. The numbers still look acceptable. The team is experienced and proud. But something has moved:

• The market has shifted to performance-based or lifecycle-cost bids while you’re still bidding lowest capex.
• Clients now expect digital, emissions or sustainability content you can’t produce.
• Competitors have configurators returning quotes in three days while you take three weeks.
• Procurement has professionalised and now scores you on things nobody is preparing for.

Or you’ve become a spec-following order-taker, when the win actually happens months earlier, at the point the client writes the specification.

Nobody believes there’s a problem, because last year was fine. Your job for the first stretch isn’t to fix anything; it’s to build a shared, evidence-based picture that the ground has moved. Loss reviews with actual client feedback, competitor turnaround benchmarking, and a hit-rate trend broken down by client type will do more for you than any proposed solution. Come in with the answer too early and you’re the outsider who doesn’t understand this industry.

🌱 Sustaining success

You’ve inherited a strong, well-regarded bid team with a healthy hit rate and good relationships with sales and execution, probably from a respected predecessor. The risk is that you change something you don’t understand, particularly informal practices that look like inefficiency but are actually the reason the offers are good.

Learn the system deeply first. Then look for the next curve: an adjacent market to bid into, a shift from equipment-only to service and lifecycle offers, or a step change in speed that competitors can’t match.

Putting it into your first 90 days

Once you know which situation you’re in, a simple three-phase plan keeps you honest:

One last thing: most roles aren’t one pure situation. You might have a core team in sustaining success, a new initiative that’s a start-up and one area quietly drifting into realignment. Diagnose each part on its own, and agree that diagnosis with your manager before you act on it.

TL;DR

• Diagnose first. Work out which STARS situation you’re in before deciding how to lead.
• Five situations, five approaches. Start-up, Turnaround, Accelerated growth, Realignment and Sustaining success each need a different playbook.
• Each has its own trap. Ask what would guarantee failure, then avoid it.
• It applies to bids and tenders. Each situation shows up on a bid desk, with practical moves for each.
• Plan your first 90 days. Diagnose, align with your manager and then secure early wins.