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Opportunity Affecting Behaviors
Over the last few weeks I have been focusing my efforts on preparing for an upcoming presentation of Tony Rizzo's "Total Matrix" two-day workshop. So, I apologize for the relative dearth of posts on this blog. In this post, I want to open a new topic -- that of "Opportunity Wasting Behaviors (OWBs)" and "Opportunity Exploiting Behaviors, (OEBs)."
In my view, there are many possible behaviors that we may manifest in the business world. If we are interested in exploiting business opportunities to the greatest possible extent, then it seems useful to attempt some kind of classification of common behaviors into two major groups.
The first group I call "Opportunity Exploiting Behaviors", or OEBs. These good behaviors are the ones that help us exploit opportunities that we have recognized as available to us.
The second group is the mirror image -- these are the "Opportunity Wasting Behaviors", or OWBs. These are the behaviors that cause us to waste opportunities that are available to us.
In some sense the development of a catalog of Exploiting and Wasting behaviors feels a lot like the development of a set of software patterns. Patterns are important in the software world. They improve our productivity by providing us with a ready-made guide for completing significant aspects of our work.
My hope is that I can develop a reasonable catalog of these behaviors. While such a catalog would be valuable in its own right, it could also be the knowledge-base for interesting computer applications.
But I'm getting ahead of myself here. Let's come back down to Earth.
In Figure 1, below, I am making the claim that our business behaviors ultimately sort into one of two categories -- either the behavior helps us to exploit an available opportunity or it causes us to in some sense waste the opportunity.
So this triggers the question of whether there are behaviors that are somehow neutral with respect to opportunities.
In my view, there is no middle ground. Yes, we may have to do an arbitrarily large amount of analysis to decide whether some given behavior actually helps us to exploit or causes us to waste opportunities. And yes, reasonable people may disagree as to whether some given behavior causes us to waste or enables us to exploit our available opportunities. But these realities are not enough to cause me to conclude that "opportunity neutral" behaviors exist.
Of course, I could be wrong. Perhaps there are behaviors that are neutral with respect to the opportunities available to us. I would appreciate receiving examples of such behaviors if they can be found.
In subsequent posts, I will be sharing some thoughts about various opportunity wasting and opportunity exploiting behaviors.
The first one on my agenda is a real heavy-hitter in causing us to waste opportunities available to us. That heavy-hitter is the relatively common behavior of multitasking.
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