Is this a pounce opportunity?

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In general, opportunity statements can be used as foundation for operations. If you believe there is no opportunity, maybe best to re-evaluate your market instead, or re-evaluate your product/service.

If you are building un-finished products to be customised and fitted for particular contexts, like we are in Satir Workshops, and/or if you plan on licensing your product, this will only work if your ally is able to use it to compete more successfully. And an opportunity statement can be helpful for introducing an opportunity to a potential ally. Moreover, understanding of requirements of competitors can be used to look for fitting allies in the landscape.

The following questions guide me in gathering the necessary information for creating a short and powerful opportunity statement:

• What is the nature of the opportunity?
• What conditions have given rise to the opportunity?
• What is the size of the opportunity?
• What drivers and boundaries must an effective competitor be able to address in order to succeed in the market?

Nature of opportunity

Emotional resilience (maturity of excellence) refers to one’s ability to adapt to stressful situations or crises. More resilient people are able to “roll with the punches” and adapt to adversity without lasting difficulties; less resilient people have a harder time with stress and life changes, both major and minor. Those who deal with minor stresses more easily can also manage major crises with greater ease, so resilience has its benefits for daily life as well as for the rare major “unexpected”.

Conditions giving rise to the opportunity

“Globalisation” and “addiction to re-incarnation” in general (and locally), are uncovering that what was hidden and has been tacitly ignored by blind authorities and leaders. Over-value-ing transactional business stances and under-value-ing transformational stances (merely going through the motions to get it off your back doesn’t work) has caused a backlog of unresolved issues and problems that haunt us all.

Everything is connected. No doubt about it. We need emotional resilience and mental fitness for solving problems effectively, and spread it as wide and far as we can. We anticipated this crunch, we watched it build up (or down rather), we come well prepared, and the timing is now. It is an emerging market.

Size of the opportunity

Probably huge. We are dealing with new and emerging markets in transformational systems thinking for emotional resilience and mental fitness. The rate at which such new “technology” will be accepted, and the rate at which it will replace other approaches to solving the same problems, are unknowns until it happens and then it’s a storm, if it does. Doing “traditional marketing research” and going for venture capital will probably make us miss the opportunity. And we can miss the pain of investor power plays.

The benefits of commercial creative commons stem from the creation of an active and engaged user community around a product or service while at the same time preventing the emergence of competitors from that community. Competitors in the community are allies. In a nutshell, the agile community helps agile roleplay get to market faster, create a superior service, and sell more easily, all at a lower cost than possible for traditional competitors. In exchange, Agile roleplay as a service offers a professionally developed service of compelling value to the Agile community that the community is free to use under a commercial creative commons license.

And surfing and regular checks on the web in well-chosen locations can quickly tell us what traditional competitors are doing and who our potential allies are, and what storm is brewing where.

Example: A major contract in the US military. See Comprehensive Soldier Fitness.

Drivers and boundaries a particular ally must be able to address

Stress arises out of resistance and has its roots in attachments (leading to doubt), dependencies (leading to fear), judgments (leading to insecurity), comparisons (leading to repression), expectations (leading to guilt), lack of response-ability (leading to blame) and the self-importance/self-pity flip (leading to shame). To be able to sell and facilitate that, you have to be able to facilitate yourself first.

And of course, the typical business renewal or start-up plots and the usual transactional drivers and boundaries are also playing a role.

More later. I’ll be meeting a potential ally in Agile IT in the next two weeks, and I’ll ask what else they need to address to become a success using “controlled folly” …

Related Articles

• Max out on resilience and get happier at work (psychologytoday.com)
• Infertility and Emotional Resilience (psychologytoday.com)
• Building Resilience Can Reduce Risks of Developing Depression: HeartMath(R) Suggest Free Resources in Light of Depression Awareness Month (prweb.com)
• Making The Leap Into Emerging Markets: An Interview With Clorox’s Beth Springer (forbes.com)