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Position Awareness
Opportunity Development
Situation Response
Opportunity Development
 Opportunity development builds competitive positions by identifying and
utilizing opportunities in the environment. Opportunity development
is necessary because your existing positions is constantly being degraded by change.
Its expansion strategy is built around a four-step process called the Progress
Cycle. As you master the tools related to this cycle, you find they are
both both exploratory and
scalable. These tools teach you to experiment safely and successfully,
avoiding obstacles and managing long campaigns in small,
opportunistic steps. Many of the rules of opportunity
development focus on controlling the costs and risks of the experiments.
One of the fundamental rules of front-line strategy is that you cannot
create opportunities. Once you understand this, you stop beating your head
against the wall trying the impossible. You see that your opportunities can
only be created only by your competitive environment. You also see that
those opportunities are all around you once you learn to see them.
Opportunities exist as "openings" in the environment that allow you to
advance your position in the direction of your mission. These openings are
usually small, but by taking advantage of the small openings, you
eventually position yourself for the big advances you want. Sun
Tzu's system of opportunity development provides a set of technical tools
that allow you to identify openings that you would normally be overlook.
Once you master this cycle, you understand why many efforts fall short.
You understand that you must complete all four steps to make any advance. If
any step in the
Progress Cycle is missing, no advance is possible.
You develop specific skills by mastering each aspect of the Progress
Cycle.
Listening identifies opportunities.
Aiming prioritizes these opportunities, identifying the smallest, easiest,
and least costly moves that take you where you want to go.
Moving teaches you how to respond appropriately to the situations
as you find them. Claiming
identifies the potential, boundaries, control, and the methods for
utilizing a new position.
Your progress in life gains speed, power, and momentum
with each successful repetition of the progress cycle. You start thinking
in terms of small, daily victories. You naturally look to use small steps
because they are quick and nearly impossible to oppose. You start using this
model is a model both for large-scale advances, defined to as "campaigns,"
and for each incremental step in those campaign.
Each step in the Progress Cycle can be broken down into any number of separate smaller
progress cycles to divide and conquer. Properly used, this technique of breaking steps into
parts is especially useful for overcoming obstacles. When you
encounter obstacles that slow or impede your program, by
mastering these techniques, you will have a number of different "edges"
which you can use to either go around it or surmount it in small parts.
The most advanced tools for the last two steps in the Progress Cycle,
moving and claiming, are part of the
situation response school of
classical strategy.
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