Ch. 3 Summary: Recognize patterns: Seeing below the chaos.


Ballet dancers call it “muscle memory.” The blackjack player uses it to decide whether to take a card or hold, and the expert chess player to diagnose and plan winning moves. Such pattern thinking, the focus of this chapter, works much like dropping a large magnet into a pool of iron filings, rather than in a linear, step-by-step combining of cues. Applying these fine-grained thinking skills, experts can succeed where ordinary cause-effect problem solving or rules-based decision making from a spreadsheet fail.


Pattern thinking can be cultivated. Securities analysts, for example, traffic in patterns as basic tools of their trade. Experts in all fields—physicians, marketers, managers, techies and business entrepreneurs--rely on pattern thinking.


A new and innovative form of brainware for many, pattern thinking emphasizes the relationships between facts rather than the facts themselves. Employees can learn to spot patterns or diagnostic stereotypes by focusing on recurring facts, unique cues and discrepancies within a specialty. Susan Hanlon, an entry level worker in marketing research at a leading agribusiness, is assigned to track the growth of a new dairy product by means of grocery data and analysis. In her first months of work, she uses pattern thinking to identify and segment consumer interest in her product. Her discoveries drive company marketing to redirect sales promotion, a significant piece of new product development.

 

Pattern recognition makes it possible to look underneath the richness and craziness of business life that does not readily lend itself to obvious cause-effect plotlines. Like physicians, leading-edge business thinkers see beyond what appear to be unrelated and chaotic data to recognize deeper patterns. For example, over a six month period, two of nine tellers and one manager at a branch bank quit their job. The exit interviewer focused upon the reasons each gave for leaving—seeing them as independent, isolated incidents that could be resolved with a quick fix such as developing a better selection process for the company recruiter. A pattern thinker would look briefly at the incidents, but then ask, “Why do we keep seeing the same problem recur over time?” Suspicious of quick-fixes, he knows they rarely resolve recurring problems. Instead, he would go upstream and keep asking “why is that happening?” over and over, and identify multiple actions that could realistically be taken for longer-term resolution. Although diagnostic stereotypes are still in the beginning stages of use, over the long term the ever-burgeoning complexity of 21st century business makes this brainpower skill an absolute necessity for the future.

 

After Tom Benedict began his career as a technology employee at a consumer products firm, he finds that cause-effect documentation provides a running start for problem solving. Documentation, however, often fails to convey the knowledge necessary for complex decision making when there is a wide range of facts and symptoms. As part of Tom’s changing responsibilities over the years, he early on develops pattern thinking to create quality controls for a major software project. Later in his career at a management consulting firm, pattern thinking provides the insight for him to profit from analyzing opportunities according to the profit pattern matrix—another highly useful diagnostic stereotype. Significantly, Tom’s experiences throw the contrast between ordinary problem solving and strategic pattern thinking into high relief, illuminating skill cultivation and pattern usefulness.

 

I reveal proprietary patterns that make it possible for employees to recognize and predict environmental changes that have the power to impact them for good or ill. These “secret” patterns are based upon clues that are hidden in plain sight. They can predict employee shake-outs, industrial slowdowns and upturns, employee contract changes, strategy shifts, successful market domination or even a firm about to take strategic bankruptcy. For example, loss of stock value, organizational contraction, shedding of temporary employees or consultants, and the presumed threat of an organizational stockholder argue for a strategic bankruptcy to benefit one group of stakeholders at the expense of others. Awareness makes it possible for an employee to go from “I’m totally oblivious to the company changes that will transform my career,” to one of “I see it coming.” Understanding the vulnerable structural processes and projects is an absolute necessity for employment security in today’s world.

 

Learning pattern thinking and using it effectively requires some effort. As in chess, one does not become a grandmaster overnight. But movement along the early learning curve is very quick, and mastery of the basic patterns can lead to dramatic performance improvements in a short time. And because the game of business is becoming more like speed chess, “getting it early” is all-important for career survival.

 

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