How high is your Opportunity Quotient?

Two hundred thousand miles from Earth a spacecraft is bleeding oxygen into the dark emptiness. It is the thirteenth of April, 1970. A minute ago Jack Swigert flipped a switch to stir the tanks, just normal housekeeping onboard the Apollo 13, but the loud bang that followed was anything but normal.

"Houston, we have a problem." The line comes down to the control center in Texas. They immediately start to figure out what happened and what the crew has lost. Two fuel cells, most of the oxygen, the power and the water, the command module built to carry the men home is dying around them.

The astronauts move into the lunar module as it has not been damaged by the explosion, but the carbon dioxide is rising fast, because it was never built to hold three sets of lungs. They have cartridges that could scrub the carbon dioxide, but they are the wrong shape. The spare ones are square, the fittings are round. On the ground the engineers throw onto a table a copy of every object the crew is known to have. A plastic bag, the cardboard cover of a flight plan, a sock, a length of hose, rolls of tape, etc. Out of that pile they build a filter that fits, read it up to the spacecraft one instruction at a time and the carbon dioxide starts to fall, minutes before it would have reached dangerously high levels. After figuring out a fair number of other problems, four days after the bang, the three men drop into the Pacific under three good parachutes.

Nothing new was ever flown up to them. Every object that carried them home was already on board when the tank blew. But the people working the problem refused to see a sealed box with a dying crew inside and instead saw a set of parts with many possible ways to arrange them, to save the crew on Apollo 13.

Most often, we decide by elimination. We look at the options already in front of us, cross off the ones that do not work and pick from what is left. In that room in Texas they widened the field of options because none of the previously existing ones was acceptable. The engineers ended up choosing from options H, S and Z that were never on the original list with A, B and C. They had a high Opportunity Quotient.

What is the Opportunity Quotient?

As mentioned in the author's note at the start, the Opportunity Quotient isn't an established concept. But let's entertain it for a moment and define it as the framework you use to measure your capacity for future-oriented thinking, your adaptability and your knack for seeing openings where other people see only dead ends.

Seeing openings

The option was not waiting to be found, it appeared when somebody pushed out the assumption.

So what does somebody with a high OQ do differently? Mostly they keep asking, where others see a closed situation and move on. A high-OQ mind runs it through a set of what-if questions. What is needed for it to be possible? If I had to find a solution ten times more efficient than the one I have? How would this change if we had to scale it 10x larger tomorrow? What is everyone in the room assuming that nobody has said out loud? How would a chef solve this? A smuggler? A gardener? Where is the third option that nobody has bothered to put on the table? What would the version of me with twice the nerve do right now? Every one of them a small refusal to believe the existing options are the only ones on offer.

Each question leans on a different muscle, I identified four: The first is cognitive flexibility, the flat refusal to take the constraints as given. The ten-times-more-efficient question lives here. It does nothing but deny that the current shape of the problem is the only shape it can have. The second is combinatorial chemistry, the habit of dragging in a field that has no business being in the room. That is the chef, the smuggler and the gardener. A high-OQ mind treats an unrelated discipline as a crate of spare parts, on the bet that maybe the thing you are stuck on has often already been solved somewhere else under a different name. The third is comfort with ambiguity. Asking what everyone is assuming but nobody has said means standing in the gap where the answer is not yet clear. The last is agency and execution. The version of you with twice the nerve. An opportunity you never chase is only a daydream, so a high OQ tends to end in the reflex to test the thing while everyone else is still thinking about it.

What a high OQ is built from

The four compose rather than add up, so whichever one is weakest caps what the other three can do.

Two kinds of walls

There is a physicist who gives all of this a harder floor to stand on. David Deutsch, considered the father of quantum computing, spends much of his book The Beginning of Infinity (2011) on a single claim: Everything that is not forbidden by the laws of nature is achievable, given the right knowledge.

Read it again: Everything that is not forbidden by the laws of nature is achievable, given the right knowledge. This sorts every wall you will ever hit into two piles. One pile is fixed. The speed of light, the second law of thermodynamics and the handful of things the universe will simply not let you do. The other pile is everything else and everything else is a knowledge problem. It looks like a wall only because nobody has worked out the way through it yet.

Two kinds of walls

Only some are fixed by physics. Everything else is soluble, a knowledge problem.

Almost nothing that stops a person in an ordinary week belongs in the fixed laws of nature. The deal that fell through, the budget that is too small, the market that looks closed, the ship two hundred thousand miles from home with the air running out. None of it is forbidden by physics. All of it is waiting on knowledge that does not exist yet or has not been assembled yet. Deutsch calls this optimism, though he means something stricter than good cheer. He means that failure comes from insufficient knowledge and not from a hostile universe, so problems are inevitable and problems are soluble, in that order.

He tells you the options are out there. Often they are sitting in plain sight.

Seen with the mind, not the eyes

Boiling your water is one of the most effective things a person can do to avoid cholera, a disease that killed by the millions through the nineteenth century (Snow, 1855). The remedy asks for nothing that was not already in every kitchen. A pot, a fire, the water itself. What was missing for most of that history was the knowledge that the water was the thing killing them and that heat would take the danger out of it. Nothing new entered the room, we just learned to arrange reality in a new way and leverage it to save millions of lives.

The same thing saved the three astronauts of Apollo 13. The sock, the hose and the cardboard were in plain view of everyone on Earth. The filter was not, until a mind looked at those same parts and saw a second use for them.

Most opportunities are seen with the mind, not with the eyes. The stars make the point better than anything. At night we can see them with our eyes. By day the sun outshines them, yet they are still there, we just have to use our mind, instead of our eyes to see them.

Optics for the mind

Where the eye falls short we reach for optics. If you think about it, a lens is an interesting kind of help, as it adds nothing. All it does is bend light that was already arriving at your eye. Galileo raised a tube of ground glass to the same night people had stared at for thousands of years and found four moons circling Jupiter (Galilei, 1610). The moons had been there the whole time. The glass only caught the light that naked eyes let slip.

But a lens can do more than magnify. Sunglasses cut the glare so you can better see the road. Polarised glass strips the reflection off a lake and the fish beneath the surface appear. A yellow tint lifts a faint shape out of fog that looked like solid grey. Lenses just modulate reality and in doing so are handing back a scene the naked eye never had.

The mind has optics too. We already have a name for them. We call them mental models. A mental model is a lens ground out of an idea. Compounding, Leverage, Survivorship bias, ... . Slip one in your mind and the situation in front of you can rearrange itself completely, making things visible you could not see before.

A lens ground out of an idea

Slip a model over the same scattered facts and they resolve into an order the naked eye could not find.

This is what a codebreaker carries. Two people stare at the same page of intercepted gibberish under the same lamp. You see a wall of random letters. She sees a word surface, then a sentence, then a submarine's position for tomorrow morning. Her eyes are no sharper than yours, they just see things with the help of mental models, as they lift out a meaning from the gibberish noise you see.

Opportunities hide in that same noise. The person who keeps walking past them is not living in a poorer world, he is just missing some optics. A high Opportunity Quotient is simply the sharpness of your mental optics. As well as reaching for another lens, if the one you are currently using doesn't produce a clear image.

So how high is yours?​As mentioned the Opportunity Quotient is not a scientific construct. Nobody has built a scale for it, validated it or published a paper. At the same time other concepts that bear some conceptual similarity have. Bandura's self-efficacy, your belief in your own capacity to do what an outcome demands, which he showed runs partly independent of whether you actually can. Next to it sits Snyder's hope, split into agency, the sense that you have the will and pathways, the sense that routes to what you want are actually there to be found. Dweck's growth mindset measures whether you believe your own abilities can grow at all. And long before any of them, around 1930, Hoppe and Lewin were already measuring the level of aspiration, watching people reset their goals after winning or losing and reading the number off behavior rather than self-report.

Every example so far has been someone else's. The room in Houston or the doctors who finally understood the water. It is easy to read about other people's blind spots. The harder question is: How many of the walls in your own life are soluble walls, things you have quietly filed under the laws of physics?

Some of those really are fixed. Others are just out of reach, by the given resources and knowledge we possess or do not possess yet. Pretending otherwise is its own kind of foolishness. But if the whole history of people is any guide, so much more than we think is actually in our reach. Look around your room, your career, your routine. How many doors are you walking past right now because you've convinced yourself they are locked? We all do it, just like in the film, Benjamin Button walks away from his love in Paris (Fincher, 2008).

So none of this is a promise. A high Opportunity Quotient will not get you everything you want. But it is a reminder, that maybe we should instead of deciding between A, B and C, try to see options D to Z, before we find ourselves staring at a landscape of neglected doors. Or as Benjamin Button puts it: "Our lives are defined by opportunities, even the ones we miss."