Each of us will have specific expertise in different areas of life.
Your expertise may be in your work in your professional capacity, or in a range of interests such as your favourite film star, football team or hobby. Consider the story told by the great Howard Gossage about his tailor friend who met the Pope. When asked what the Pope was like, the tailor replied: ‘He was a 42 medium!’
Most public relations professionals have great expertise in recognizing the media potential of raw information. Our organiza-tions or clients have certain facts about them and as public rela-tions professionals you can read this material and translate it into its potential media interest. When reading a newspaper the public relations practitioner will read it differently from a non-practi-tioner, with the ability to dissect different sources of material and treatments of stories and issues.
As with exercising a muscle, you can extend your sagacity performance by focusing and exercising. A valuable tip is every
You are never more than 12 feet from an opportunity
day to look for three good things and three not so good things rele-vant to your area of expertise. But don’t just say ‘That’s good’ and
‘That’s bad’. Instead, dissect why it is good or why it is bad. One area of my work is brand design. So each day I look out for three good examples of design and build up a reservoir of potential good ideas and also pitfalls and bad practice to avoid. By adopting this habit you sensitize your ‘opportunity radar’ to pick up poten-tial opportunities that are within 12 feet of you.
From my experience people who are brilliant at spotting oppor-tunities practise seven key habits. Stephen Covey wrote a world-wide best seller The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (Covey, 1989). This represents an opportunity, so the next part of this chapter outlines the seven habits of highly opportunistic people.
The ‘rules’ described below can also help make you more ‘lucky’!
1. BE PRINCIPLED
It is curious that if someone is described as ‘opportunistic’ it is often meant in derogatory terms. The inference being that the person lacks principles. Yet any review of great ideas people – whether they are a scientist, explorer or communicator – all display a great ability to take advantage of opportunities: of being
‘opportunistic’.
Yet creative greats, despite being opportunistic, also tend to be highly principled. Their principled nature is based around having a strong sense of mission, belief in their abilities and their quest, and possessing a very strong personal brand based on a clear set of values.
By having a clearly defined personality, or at least a stand on a subject, you act like a beacon or a magnet for other people to come to you. From my own experience I often get approaches along the lines of ‘I know you’re interested in creativity, and I thought you might like to know about…’
As a creative practitioner, if you have a mission for looking out for new ideas and opportunities you are sending a strong message to yourself, in your intrapersonal communication, to be receptive to stimuli around you. Externally, you are sending out signals for other people to be aware of your personal mission.
Don Sull, an associate professor of management at London Business School, carried out a study, described in an article in the
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Financial Times (London), 6 February 2006, on what made ‘lucky’
managers and businesses. Don Sull highlighted the need for exec-utives to keep their priorities clear. By attempting to pursue too many priorities simultaneously, executives dissipate resources and hinder coordination across units. Managers must exercise ruthless discipline in choosing a small number of objectives to pursue first.
Don Sull added:
The more successful companies are luckier in the sense that time and again they responded more effectively to unexpected shifts in regu-lation, technology, competition, macroeconomics or other volatile factors. Such luck is too important to leave to chance. The most successful companies exemplified ‘active waiting’, an approach to strategy in highly unpredictable markets that consists of anticipating and preparing for threats that executives can neither fully predict nor control.
What are the important things for you that you want to achieve through your work?
2. BELIEVE THERE ARE OPPORTUNITIES – PRIME YOURSELF
The great opportunity spotters have a major fundamental belief;
they believe there are opportunities around. Priming your mind and telling yourself there must be something out there is a form of rocket fuel to keep you going until you eventually find such an opportunity.
You need to have what is called a ‘Hibris’ attitude to sustain your opportunity hunting. This mental state is like hubris in that it employs a positive arrogance on its ability to achieve success. Yet in a Hibris state the arrogance is focused on the ability to be successful but tempered with humility; you don’t know every-thing, you have a flexibility of thought and respect that there is always something to learn from, even from the unlikeliest of sources.
The Hibris state recognizes that your mental models are best guesses and so you should be on the look out for different ones.
When confronted with problems look at the assumptions behind the situation. Look for relationships, and how events fit together,
You are never more than 12 feet from an opportunity
and consider what are the causes and effects in the situation you are examining. Because of its diversity and breadth of interests a Hibris state is more comfortable with ambiguity and maintains a curiosity with the outside world. It pays particular attention to experiences that contradict your mental models, and seeks to obtain constructive feedback to learn from any experience.
Simon Hughes, of the Central Office of Information, recognizes the importance of keeping an open mind and being receptive to the unlikeliest sources of information. One tool that he uses could be called a ‘muse log’. This takes the form of a little black book that he carries around with him and uses to capture thoughts and musings, details and observations. While being all too aware of the huge range of electronic devices that could be used to replace pen and paper, he feels that the act of both physically jotting down these muses and then being able to access them simply by skim-ming through the pages creates a very different dynamic. It is somehow a more liberating way of lighting upon ideas when compared to being forced to file information away in some form of organized electronic retrieval system.
So what kind of things would you find in his muse log?
Observations about who and why someone is the best black hair-dresser in Catford, South London, gleaned from an animated discussion overheard on an early morning commute mingle with notes on possible music tracks for events and ideas on change management and leadership. It is a heady mix of musing.
There is no rational hard evidence of such musings being able to lead instantly to an added value opportunity. It does however, harness one of your powerful resources, your intuition; at a subconscious level your mind is registering such information as standing out from the ordinary. This sends out a signal which most people ignore but perceptive people like Simon recognize its longer-term value and significance.
To be a receptive opportunity spotter you need to develop a sense of what Richard Wiseman calls ‘mindfulness’ – the ability to pay attention to the present rather than thinking and behaving on autopilot. One tip to get yourself out of autopilot mode is to study a familiar object and explore and identify new things you had not noticed before. On one creativity course where participants had to hide their watch from view and describe it in as much detail as possible, one delegate described a watch in incredible detail, only to discover she was wearing a different watch that day!
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Do you have a Hibris attitude to any campaign you are working on?
3. TRY MORE, LITTLE AND OFTEN
If you want to win a raffle or a lottery the more tickets you have, the more chance you have got of winning and the same applies to exercising your creativity and idea sparking; the more ideas you generate and try, the more likely you will get a winner. Certainly, this entails that many of your ideas will not win. Creativity, like the art of selling, is a percentage game; if you try once, don’t succeed and give up you will be less successful than your counter-parts who keep trying until they get a result. If a campaign idea fails, try again.
4. SEE A BIGGER PICTURE
The blind men in the Indian fable were guilty of looking at a ‘little picture’, a small box of the situation, seeing only part of a problem.
By creating a bigger picture, taking in scenery others might miss in their more blinkered world view, you can spot the opportunities.
Richard Wiseman describes an experiment where a group of people were surveyed and classified into two groups: those who defined themselves as lucky and those who felt they were unlucky.
He gave the whole group the same exercise of counting the number of pictures in a newspaper. Unbeknown to the group, there was a large advert in the centre of the newspaper boldly telling them to stop counting and telling them how many pictures there were in the newspaper. Only half the group spotted the advert – it correlated with those who defined themselves as
‘lucky’. Wiseman’s conclusion is that lucky people have a bigger field of vision in their engagement with the world, perhaps seeing things at the periphery which other more tunnel-vision types would miss.
Don Sull observed how enterprising managers would ‘Conduct reconnaissance into the future: send out probes in a few directions to broaden the search for opportunities rather than staking every-thing on a single way forward.’ Often the lead you get for an opportunity is not clearly defined or articulated. Creative
You are never more than 12 feet from an opportunity
opportunity spotters must also remain alert to anomalies – new information that surprises them or conflicts with expectations. In a fast-moving world of turbulent markets, mental maps quickly become outdated, and anomalies provide clues as to where the map is wrong.
Pressure makes people produce fewer and less diverse ideas.
Richard Wiseman, in his book Did you Spot the Gorilla? (Wiseman, 2004), describes an experiment where two groups are given the same task of drawing as many different pictures as possible in a number of empty boxes. The first group are told they only have one minute to do the exercise, the second are initially told they have three minutes, but are actually stopped after one minute,
Despite having the same amount of time, the groups produce dramatically different results, with the second group generating more, and more varied, designs. Here, the perception of having an abundance of time is more helpful than the perception of having too little time.
5. USE EVERY CONNECTION
Many of us will have had the experience of working with very negative colleagues who when faced with a problem would give up. My advice to them was to ask someone else for the answer.
Nine times out of ten, the person they asked would either know the answer or know someone else who might know. And guess what? These other people will also know around 150 people, so they could possibly plug into these people as well.
Who do you know who could help you be more successful?
6. FLIP THE NEGATIVE
The author organized a reception event where the British Prime Minister was guest of honour. After the clients had their photo taken he spotted an opportunity to have a photo taken with Mr Blair. Hand outstretched, he asked: ‘Mr Blair can I have my photo taken with you please?’ Instead of the instant photo flash, he heard
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the photographer say: ‘Can you hold it there? I have to change my film.’ There he was with the most powerful man in Britain. Instead of seizing the moment and saying something profound he lamely blubbered: ‘Nice speech’. Afterwards he was annoyed with himself for messing up the opportunity.
The author shared the story in a chance encounter on a train with a friend who ran a publishing company and the idea emerged for a book called A Minute with Tony Blair. A range of celebrities and people from all sectors of the community were approached with their responses to the question: ‘If you had a minute with Tony Blair what would you say?’ The responses ranged from the profound to the comical (‘Do you wear boxer shorts?’ was one question!).
The resulting book enjoyed great coverage and interest. It also demonstrated how you can turn the negative into the positive.
Opportunistic people have the ability to see ‘problems’ as opportunities. What ‘problems’ can you transform into new opportunities?
7. BE PERSISTENT
Opportunistic people don’t give up. If faced with a straight ‘No’, or other rejection there are always ways to try again, or make a different approach. Simply to keep turning up often leads to success.
8. DO MORE
It was mentioned earlier that there are seven habits of oppor-tunistic people. Creative practitioners are also marked out by doing more, going beyond what was asked or expected. The eighth factor is that outstanding creative results invariably come from someone driven to do more. Look back on any outstanding success you have been involved with and you probably went the extra mile in some way.
Furthermore, when you have a gut feeling about something, learn to spot the feeling and trust your instincts. If you come across an opportunity that on the surface has little obvious added value,
You are never more than 12 feet from an opportunity
but you feel ‘there could be something in it’, that is a sign from your intuition. Learn to be aware of these signals. And listen to them.
OVERVIEW
By developing your sagacity skills to spot opportunities you will be able to harness the many potential ideas around you waiting to be harnessed and developed to achieve great creative results.
There is a tendency to regard the creative act as always working with a blank canvas. In reality, great added value results are more often achieved by surfing with someone else’s idea or opportunity.
SUMMARY
1. The creative person is often an outstanding opportunity hunter, spotter and harvester of other people’s ideas.
2. Being opportunistic does not make you unprincipled.
3. Outstanding creative practitioners often have a strong sense of mission or purpose in their life which acts like a magnet to attract potential opportunities.
4. Belief in the availability of opportunities, the ability to turn negatives into positives, trying more, little and often, seeing a bigger picture, using every connection, flipping the negative, persistence and going the extra mile are the characteristics of the successful creative opportunity spotter.
KEY WORDS FOR YOUR CREATIVITY VOCABULARY
● Sagacity.
● Surfing.
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Flexible thinking is the most powerful tool you have to create and manage your future. In fact, it’s the only tool.
Comment to creativity course delegates The ‘creative diamond’ is represented by your four quotients – this is the model underpinning what makes any person or team creative.
Intelligence quotient is well known as one measure of ability.
You also have quotients in your emotional, vision and adversity skills which, when working together with your intelligence, enable you to create ideas.
The way you think is shaped by the way you use these different quotients. Each challenge you face is different. Sometimes you will need to generate new insights, new options. Other times you may need to explore the full logical facts, or need emotionally to get under the skin of a situation, or be determined to overcome oppo-sition to get your way or deliver your solution.
The outstanding public relations creative is marked by being flexible and being able to secure the optimum balance between