Are you guilty of missing opportunities like the 'Wobbly Bridge' in your life?

At a conference talk I recently shared one of my most unsuccessful PR campaigns ever, yet a story also of one of Britain’s biggest missed opportunities (putting BREXIT to one side).

It serves as a salutary warning for all of to avoid being blind to serendipity and the ‘Golden Swans’ in your life.

Yes, I led a campaign to save the ‘Wobble’ - the infamous, unexpected movement of the Millennium footbridge in London, discovered on its opening in June 2000.

I’m convinced the ‘Wobbly Bridge’ would have become one of Capital’s top three visitor attractions. You can imagine American visitors wowing, ‘Guys, I love your wobbly bridge! You’re so inventive!”

We would have had annual wobble festivals, sponsorship from a jelly company, and celebrations of Britain’s innate creative genius. Apparently, on the bridge’s opening complete strangers were coming together to do spontaneous Madness-like group duck walks to accentuate the wobble feeling. What fun!

Instead, ￡5 million of taxpayer’s money was wasted rectifying the wobble, creating bad PR for British architecture and engineering, and the worst sin of all, in my opinion, a great opportunity missed.

Missed by ignoring a lone voice pleading to save the Millennium footbridge wobble (If only social media had been around then, I’m sure my campaign would have been successful.)

In fairness to its engineers the wobble phenomenon, or 'synchronous lateral excitation' was relatively unknown, not easily predictable. Few footbridges of this scale had been built. The wobble movement was actually quite slight, ultimately self-limiting as more people boarded the bridge its ‘wobble’ effect subsides, long before reaching structural safety limits or posing a health and safety hazard.

Yet, the wobble wasn’t really a problem. Its unexpectedness, not being planned and instantly labelling a ‘problem’ led to over-focusing, functional fixation, blind to wider opportunities. Just because it wasn’t part of your original plan shouldn’t mean it is precluded from your future planning.

Opening soon after the Millennium Dome, then regarded as a white elephant failure, inevitably anything associated with any hint of going awry was labelled a fiasco. Heads must roll and the wobble eliminated.

Yet was the wobble a problem?

Let us use an historical metaphor. Imagine you are in the Mayor of a nondescript mediaeval Italian town.

Through one office door enters your chief engineer shouting: “Boss, we gotta problem with our bell tower. It’s developed a lean! We need to spend five million lire to put it right.” Your head of tourism entering through the other door calmly declares: “There could be something in this...”

Who should the Mayor listen to?

Thinking about the Millennium footbridge. At the very least its specification needs to get you from one side of the river to other without your feet getting wet.

It sits within a bigger paradigm of needing to offer a relative degree of safety and comfort. Hence, a rope bridge although cheaper, would clearly not have been suitable.

Thinking even bigger, the footbridge is… a tourist attraction.

Today over 1 million tourists visit Pisa - and to be honest there’s not much there other than the Tower.

The wobble instead of being regarded as a problem should have been accepted, like the leaning tower of Pisa became, as an opportunity. Even more tourists would have flocked to savour the ‘wobbly bridge’ experience, instead of all the negatives that ensued.

I call really big opportunities ‘Golden’ Swans’.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his influential book ‘The Black Swan’ describes potentially transformational experiences as ‘black swans’. Although often perceived as very negative (the world global recession hit at the time of the book’s publication) they can also be positive - hence the need, in my view, for another name - a ‘Golden Swan’

Are you guilty of missing the Golden Swan moments in your life?

The most fundamental quality for ensuring you have great sagacity - the ability to observe a bigger picture, do now what you would do in hindsight, is the simple humble belief that opportunities are all around you. How you are never more than 12ft from an opportunity.

Professor Richard Wiseman is described as a ‘Professor of Luck’. In one of his experiment he gave a group - previously profiled as defining themselves as ‘lucky’ or ‘unlucky’ - a newspaper. They all had look through it to count how many photographs were inside. The ‘unlucky’ people on average, took about two minutes to complete the exercise, whereas the ‘lucky’ just seconds. How?

Page two featured an ad with the message: "Stop counting. There are 43 photographs in this newspaper." The half page ad, written in two inch high type, shouted to be noticed. Yet the unlucky tended to miss it while the ‘lucky’ tended to spot it.

Unlucky people miss chance opportunities because they are too focused on looking for something else. Lucky people are more relaxed and open, seeing what is there rather than just what they are looking for.

Lucky people, according to Wiseman, generate good fortune via four basic principles.

1. They are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities,

2. Listen to their intuition

3. Create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations

4. Adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good.

One of my creative heroes is Harry Beck, the designer of the London Tube map, lauded as a design classic. Despite its genius Harry Beck’s design was rejected at first attempt. Inspired by his pertinacity - and also that the same experience with Transport for London rejecting my book ‘Tubespiration’ - I created a ‘Harry Beck-o-meter to sensitise to potential Golden Swans in your life.

If presented with an idea that is different from how you currently do things, do you?

1. Ignore them, refuse to listen, or tell them to go away without listening to what they have to say.
2. Feel threatened by them, react to constructive feedback as criticism, or don’t make any decision.
3. Add it to your pending pile with an intention to review it but never do.
4. Agree to listen but with limited expectations.
5. You are busy but you listen and engage with humility and benign scepticism - actively listening with a challenging yet open mind, ready to change as a result of what you have discovered.

Scoring a ‘4’ or ‘5’ helps you avoid missing out on your equivalent of the ‘Wobble’ and other Golden Swans that could transform your situation.  How would Harry Beck get on today? Sadly, I personally doubt if he would get through the door. Even sadder, I witness really good, talented, committed people doing the same thing, failing the Harry Beck-o-meter test.

When it comes to spotting opportunities, being open to the Golden Swans, the equivalent of the wobbly bridge in your life, are you going to say ‘Yes’ or ‘No’. It’s your choice. You make your own luck.