Now that we have found some balance, we will continue our journey of coping, collecting information, and planning for tomorrow. Here, we discuss identifying your opportunities, threats, inflection points, undertow problems, and strategic gaps.

Scan Your Environment
Earlier, I spoke of listening to your environment. Now, actively search your various environments for clues about future opportunities, threats, inflection points, undertow problems, or strategic gaps. These are covered in various places throughout this book.

Identify Opportunities
Identify current and anticipate future opportunities. Write them down. Refer back to them. The goal is to maximize our ability to respond to opportunities, to have the resources ready when they are needed, and to be able to reach through an open window of opportunity and latch onto that opportunity to make it our own.

Identify Threats
Assess (Now) and anticipate (Future) threats. Your goal is to minimize the impact of threats now and in the future. Write them down, reflect on them and take actions to avoid them. Imagine you are crawling across a field full of landmines. While still focusing on the goal of crossing the field, try to avoid these land mines.

Also, change your lenses, and look for opportunities among the threats. Remember,
. . . a problem is often just an opportunity in disguise. . .
Turn lemons into lemonade.

Look for Inflection Points
Inflection points are points of significant changes in one’s environment. Identify those points from your past. They may have also been Defining Moments. Anticipate inflection points in the future. For example, we now talk about “post-9/11” - after the Trade Center bombing. That was a cultural inflection point, after which much else changed. Or, imagine that you are a maker of slide rules and that computer technology is being developed. Bang! It’s on the market. You go to work. What will you do that day?

Look for Undertow Problems
Undertow problems are less visible than inflection points. They are situations that, if unattended, may sweep you away just as an undertow current in the water might do. It might be a personal issue - an escalating dependence on drugs or alcohol, for example–or it might be operating in your surroundings.

When looking at the environment around you, and predicting what might happen in each, seek to unveil both inflection points and undertow problems.

Look For Undertow Problems

Drama at the base of Rock-Balancing Mts. #2 + #3 (with spots: Coyote was so intent on searching out the eternally elusive milkbones that she jumped smack into the gunderswatch. S. Gullikson ’85.

Identify Strategic Gaps
Strategic gaps are differences between where we want to be in the future, and where we will be, using our current strategies and actions. It is a concept that is looking to the future. If I am not saving money now, how will I have the retirement I need for my future? Look for the strategic gaps - project yourself into the future on the primary pieces of your life. What needs to change to make your future be what you want it to be, in each of the pieces that make up your life?