Capability

Translating Regulation Into a Decision

The skill that matters is translating dense regulation into a decision someone can act on Monday morning.

By Joary Khairudin-Casey, Founder · Principal Consultant · September 21, 2026 · Long Read · 6 min

A few weeks ago, in a virtual classroom of contracting officers from three different agencies, someone asked me a question I get often. “How do I know if a vendor is truly qualified, or if they just sound good?” I told them what I tell every group I teach. The vendors who last are the ones who can explain their work clearly.

That answer got more of a reaction than I expected. We spent the next twenty minutes on why.

The Source Material

Federal acquisition uses dense, regulation-heavy language. The Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) is long, and so is everything around it. Agency supplements, Office of Federal Procurement Policy (OFPP) memos, executive orders, and changes in policy interpretation all add to it.

In class I watch people repeat phrases like “best value” or “whole life cycle costing” without being able to say what changes when the concept applies. I've also watched the person who uses the vocabulary sound authoritative while the person who can explain the decision underneath it gets less attention.

I see the same thing outside the classroom. Proposals read like piled-up jargon. Teams on capture calls can't explain their differentiators in plain English.

Translation in Practice

Translation takes something complex and makes it usable. When I teach FPM 121 or a Contracting Officer's Representative (COR) Refresher, my measure of success is whether students can apply it on Monday morning.

First, I start with the source. I read the FAR clause, the OFPP memo, and the statute. I don't rely on someone else's summary, since a summary is a translation that already happened.

Then I find the operational question underneath the language: what decision the clause shapes and what changes when it applies. Once I have that, I rebuild the explanation in the language a working contracting officer or a small business owner would use. I give an example from a scenario I've worked. Only after that do I let the formal terminology back in. By then the audience has a structure to attach it to.

Trust and Credentials

Credentials get me into the conversation. Federal Acquisition Certification in Contracting (FAC-C), Federal Acquisition Certification for Contracting Officer's Representatives (FAC-COR), Project Management Professional (PMP), the right years of experience, the right agency exposure. Those matter. They prove I've done the work.

After the first ten minutes of a client conversation, what matters is whether I can explain a complicated requirement in language the client can act on and whether my explanation matches what they're seeing in their operation.

I've watched seasoned acquisition professionals lose credibility in a meeting because they couldn't explain their point in plain terms. I've also watched first-year contracting officers earn trust from senior leaders because they took a complex regulation, restated it in three sentences, and named the specific decision in front of the team.

Referrals, in my experience, come from the people I helped understand something.

Weekly Practice

If you want to practice this, you can pick one acronym you used this week that someone in your circle wouldn't recognize. FAC-COR. Administrative Contracting Officer (ACO). Procurement Administrative Lead Time (PALT). SAM.gov. Whatever it was.

Three sentences in plain English tend to be enough: what it is, when it applies, and what changes because of it. Reading them out loud shows whether they still sound like a citation. Then do that again next week and the week after.

It's small and repeatable.

If this was useful, follow NovaLux™ Strategies on LinkedIn or reply with the acronym you translated this week. I would love to see how it went.