How to Recognize Opportunities
"A good deal happens in a man's life that he isn't responsible for. Fortunate openings occur; but it is safe to remember that such "breaks" are occurring all the time, and other things being equal, the advantage goes to the man who is ready." Lawrence Downs
While I have written about identifying opportunities in an earlier article, there is a lot more to say about the process. We can now relate the process to the problems with the cost of conflict, that we covered in the last article. We advance our positions by using openings because that is how we avoid costly conflict. We do not create are own opportunities. Others must create them for us because our rewards must come from others.
Competitive strategy seeks rewards. Rewards come from developing positions in people’s minds that others want to reward. Conflict is a mistake based on two misconceptions.
The first is that there is only a finite number of positions, that is, valuable ground, that offers rewards.
The second misconception is that existing ground can yield only a limited amount of rewards.
If the competitive ground and its resources are limited, conflict is unavoidable. As the number of people increases, they can only win rewards by taking valuable ground from others. This would mean that the costs of conflict are also unavoidable and that all of humanity is forever locked into a war of attrition in which we all must grow poorer protecting what we have.
This viewpoint is simply wrong. Wrong on the nature of “competitive ground” and wrong on the nature of “value.” Those who have been forecasting doom since Malthus are doing their math starting with flawed premises.
The limited space of physical ground is a useful analogy for strategic ground, but strategic ground is infinite. Strategic ground exists in people’s minds. It is “mind space.” More people create more ground not less. Not only do more people create more ground space, but the ideas and inventions of those minds to create more competitive space, new places to hold new human desires.
Our minds developed to deal with the physical ground so we use it an analogy. Thinking about the physical ground, which we can understand, gives us a way of exploring the various dimensions of psychological ground, which we cannot understand easily. However, the two types of ground differ in their basic natures. In a number of future articles, we will discuss the various characteristics of competitive ground and how we use them to compare different opportunities. While these characteristics are based on the physical ground, we will explore them as psychological, strategic spaces.
Understanding this, Sun Tzu taught 2,500 years ago that the ground was infinite. He predicted that we would never run short of new, valuable ground. If he could see this great truth from an agrarian culture 2,500 years ago, where value was still largely based on the physical ground, why do we still have problems seeing it today when the hottest new ground is areas like cryptocurrency and private space exploration?
The value of any ground comes only from our knowledge about how to use it to address human needs. Are human needs limited in some ways? After our basic needs for food and shelter are satisfied, do our needs vanish? No, human nature supplies an infinite number of needs. Like the heads of the mythological hydra, as one need is satisfied, two more grows in its place.
Will robots and artificial intelligence automate all work so those needs are filled without employing human beings? No, because only the human mind is creative. Artificial intelligence cannot create new ideas, see opportunities, find newer, lower-cost methods for satisfying them. Artificial intelligence can solve very specific classes of problems, but the problems have to be identified by humans,
As our knowledge grows, new resources become available from new types of ground. The only key resource is the human mind and its ability to learn. Valuable resources are not less and less common. Silicon, which is literally as common as the sand on the shore, is the physical basis of today’s computer technology and the constantly growing space of the computing cloud.
Conflict avoidance leads directly to the deeper lessons of strategy, especially a deeper understanding of the nature of positions and opportunities. Understood correctly, we can advance our positions in any direction, in directions that no one else has even seen. Once we stop focusing on what others have and start seeing what people want, we can see undiscovered opportunities all around us. The wisest way to direct our energies is to look for rewards in areas where we have no opposition, not in the past but in the imagined future.
Openings are the psychological landscape in people’s minds for which physical space is an analogy.
In many future articles, we will be discussing the nature of “the ground” using the physical ground as an analogy, but we must never confuse the analogy, the map, with the territory. The actual territory is always mysterious and hidden. Positions in it must be discovered by moves that test our ideas.
Opportunities exist as empty positions—openings—not positions that are already taken.
We move into openings, unoccupied positions. What we see are positions that are already occupied. We must not focus on them. We cannot take the position of others. We must think in terms for creating new positions for ourselves. We must avoid areas that are crowded with potential competitors. The mistaken conflict model of competitive strategy focuses us on our perceived opponents instead of the larger environment where our opportunities lie. While we must be aware of the positions of others in the environment, we use that awareness to help us identify where our opportunities might lie.
The easiest way to find psychological openings is to look for unsatisfied needs.
Strategic success means making new positions pay and nothing pays except satisfying people's needs. As we cannot say too often, a successful position is one that others cannot attack, and ideally, they want to join. The power of looking for openings as needs is that it moves us away from conflict with others and into areas where we can win people's support. Strategy is the search for supporters who are willing to reward us.
There are infinite potential open positions in our environment.
The psychological ground is infinite because human needs are infinite. As soon as one need is filled, two more open up. No matter how dominant the positions of others are in any environment, they always leave plenty of openings for us to exploit. Those dominant players should be seen as people with needs and the resources to reward those who can satisfy them. Google creates more wealth by buying companies. The future is not predictable because no one can know all the forms opportunity can take in the future. Will crypto fail? Will we call artificial intelligence ultimately be a wild goose chase? It could be, but while times and efforts are wasted in those crowded areas, other areas will arise.
Openings leverage the forces of the environment to work for us rather than against us.
Nature abhors a vacuum. By seeing opportunities as openings in the larger environment, we leverage the natural forces in the environment that are seeking to fill that opening. This is particularly easy when we are working on the psychological level of people's unfulfilled needs. People reward us to fill their needs. They do not have to know the source of their needs nor do they have to justify the justice of their wants. The heart wants what the heart wants.
Our discovery of new ground is limited only by our imagination.
Our creative ability is the source of discovery. Innovation creates new methods. New methods open new ground. Creativity is not a rare skill, but a task that we can learn to do in a systematic way, something we will discuss in detail in future articles as well. It is a supremely human task, only accomplished by conscious, intelligent beings, not machines. Only humans can understand the needs of other humans.
Conclusion
When we fight over existing ground, we put others, especially our opponents, in control of our situations. When we explore new ground, we take the initiative away from others. We free ourselves from the past. The creative approach to opportunities puts us in control of our own position and situation. The more inventive we are in creating our own positions, the less destructive conflict that we have with others. The idea that creativity creates momentum is one of the major keys to strategy. Another topic for future articles.