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Opportunities: catch them if you can

By Peter Honey (February 2005 Issue)
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Opportunities are funny things. For a start, what constitutes an opportunity is largely a matter of opinion. They only really exist in the eye of the beholder. Something you might seize on as an opportunity, I might shrink from as a threat. (For reasons I can’t quite fathom, bungee jumping comes to mind!) Many years ago a man contacted me about an ‘unmissable’ business opportunity. I was sufficiently intrigued to meet with him. What was it that could be so ‘mutually beneficial’? It turned out to be bottled water. This was in the days when drinking water only came out of taps and I failed to see how water in bottles could ever catch on! The rest, as they say, is history.

Even when you recognise an opportunity as an opportunity, you might not have the courage to exploit it. I’m the first to admit that, over the years, I have had many opportunities to interact with interesting people – only to miss out because I was tongue-tied! I was amused to read that Schubert, the gifted composer, suffered from the same problem. It would seem he had plenty of opportunities to introduce himself to Beethoven (26 years his senior and much more famous) and he very much wanted to do so. Apparently, they both frequented the same coffee house in Vienna where Beethoven had a reserved table. But poor Schubert held Beethoven in such awe that he never plucked up enough courage to go over and say hello.

Opportunities have a habit of cropping up when you least expect them. Of course, it is possible to plan an opportunity, but more often than not they are spontaneous, unplanned things. There were some interesting examples of the serendipitous nature of opportunities at a lecture I attended organised by the Prisoners’ Education Trust. Emma Hughes, author of Free to Learn?,1 spoke movingly about her research based on in-depth interviews with 47 inmates who were undertaking distance learning in prison. The research investigated, among other aspects, how prisoners had first found out about the opportunity to do distance learning. Usually it had been mentioned, quite by chance, during a casual conversation with another prisoner – typically when they were grumbling about the sheer boredom of being ‘banged up’ in their cells for long periods or about the banality of the jobs offered in the prison workshops.

Opportunities can present themselves not only suddenly but also fleetingly, which means that spotting and seizing them has to happen quickly. You only have to think of the opportunities that occur during many fast-moving sports to realise you have to be pretty nifty to take advantage of them. Someone once explained to me that basically all ball games consist of two different circumstances: those in which the ball is moving and those in which the ball is stationary. So, taking football as an example (my sons will be proud of me!), passing the ball between players and tackling are moving-ball situations, whereas taking a corner or a penalty are still-ball situations. The opportunities these two situations present place quite different demands on the players. The former requires fast reflexes and the latter steady nerves – not only for the player but also for the spectator.

Opportunities often only reveal themselves retrospectively, with the benefit of hindsight. This explains why so many opportunities are missed. If you type ‘missed opportunities’ into Google, up come more than two million entries. There are missed political, military, medical, commercial, romantic and sporting opportunities. Some of these have serious repercussions. The report produced by the 9/11 Commission, for example, identified ten opportunities that were missed, each of which could possibly have prevented the terrorist hijackings in the USA in 2001 (and all the subsequent strife and upheaval).

The good news, however, is that all opportunities, whether they are planned or spontaneous, recognised or missed, exploited successfully or disastrously, have the capacity to generate learning. You could say that the primary purpose of trainers and developers (and managers!) is to provide people with learning opportunities. Some of the opportunities we provide are the equivalent of still-ball situations – a programme of off-the-job courses, for example, for which people have time to plan their attendance and, sometimes, even set some learning objectives. Others, such as work-based learning opportunities, are more akin to moving-ball situations, where people have to recognise the opportunity and seize the moment.

Edward de Bono, credited as the leading authority on creative thinking, advocates that opportunities should be searched for deliberately lest they pass us by unidentified. He claims that too many of us are hell-bent on solving ‘urgent’ problems and we easily miss opportunities that are ‘only important’.2

In view of the fact that opportunities are so often fleeting and fickle, perhaps we should provide them clearly labelled: ‘Please note – this is an opportunity’. Just think, with adequate labelling I might have been a bottled water millionaire by now. As Chinese general Sun Tzu (circa 500 BC) said, ‘One opportunity grasped is a dozen opportunities made.’

References
1. Emma Hughes, Free to Learn?: Prisoner-students’ Views on Distance Learning, Prisoners’ Education Trust, 2004.
2. Edward de Bono, Opportunities: A Handbook of Business Opportunity Search, Penguin Books, 1993.


Dr Peter Honey, FRSA, FCIPD, FIMC is a Chartered Psychologist and founder of Peter Honey Publications. He can be contacted on +44 (0) 1628 633946, at peterhoney@peterhoney.com or visit www.peterhoney.com

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