Hidden in Plain Sight — How Identifying Patterns Leads to Success

Regardless of your place in life, patterns, or themes, play an important part in your daily routine. Many of us don’t recognize patterns either large or small. Experiences, interactions, and flow happen to us all day long and we look at these events as separate and distinct with little or no relationship to each other. It is important, however, to be aware of context. Context is relatability and relatability results in patterns. Context is the situation within which something exists or happens.

Context is the situation within which something exists or happens.

Knowing that the world, and business, is made up of patterns is important for:

1. Baselining your understanding of one subject against another,
2. Understanding how people, places, and things interact over time, projects, departments, and companies can become sources for identifying opportunities for success,
3. Understanding what contributes to and how to impact failures — patterns of failure,
4. Understanding what drives and delivers success — patterns of success.

Being able to recognize patterns will be more valuable to you than just the four items listed above. However, sticking with our theme of transformations, their reasons for failures, and how to deliver them successfully, these four items will allow us to make a compelling argument for why understanding patterns, and using them to your advantage will have tremendous, successful implications for your enterprise transformation initiatives.

Transformation Patterns

I admit it, seeing the forest for the trees is difficult. It takes time, awareness, and the ability to look at behaviors, impacts, and outcomes, many times in very complex situations. The last article in this series titled Don’t Leave Your Transformation to Chance has eight “red flags” that one should look for and address to ensure a successful transformation.

I would argue that “being pattern aware” is helpful in managing all eight of them, however, let’s dive into two that will help explain how to spot and harness patterns to the success of your transformation. Those two patterns are:

• Number 1 — The Problem Pattern: From the start, do you have a clear goal for the transformation? What are the metrics you wish to achieve? What problem are you trying to solve? Who is your company trying to become? and,
• Number 7 — Afraid of change — The Fear Pattern: Is your organization ready for change or are they afraid of change? Has there been a thorough assessment of all and what needs to change to break the status quo and move to the new model?

Let’s dive into these two “red flags” and look at them through the lens of patterns. As we do so, remember the line “The Closer You Look, The Less You’ll Actually See”. Pulling back to “100,000 feet”, as the saying goes, is an important skill in being able to see the forest for the trees, and is an important skill in pattern recognition.

Topic 1: The Patterns of Problems

I’ve spent a significant amount of time writing on the subject of problems. It’s important to understand this word, what it actually means, and its relationship to patterns.

The definition of a problem is “a matter or situation regarded as unwelcome or harmful and needing to be dealt with and overcome.” Continuing with our use of CX transformation problems from our last post, let’s discuss how patterns apply to problems.

Problems are patterns

First, problems are patterns. Take a moment to think about what you consider a problem. Typically, problems are repetitive. They show up frequently in your life otherwise you wouldn’t give them much attention. To understand what I mean by this, let’s use the following example. In Corporate Fire Drills — Why They Are a Problem, we discussed how Fire Drills are a pattern in themselves and that this repetitive, non-informed approach to problem-solving leads you away from understanding the problem at hand into a land of undirected, reactive, chaotic reaction.

What we didn’t talk about, is that if you could see problems and patterns of problems, that is, if you could pull back to the “100,000-foot level”, you will see fire drills as distinct patterns that repeat themselves. Your mind would allow you to see that there was a pattern in your behavior and that the pattern was not productive. The pattern is that you are repeatedly attacking the same issue or repeatedly reacting to certain types of issues in a common way and that the outcome of the reaction was not getting you what you wanted.

It is your relationship to perspective that will allow you to recognize patterns.

If you had been pattern aware, you would have solved your own companies’ Fire Drill culture by recognizing it without assistance.

How you react to problems, how you see problems, how you talk about problems, if understood, will surface a perspective that will allow this destructive, repetitive behavior to the surface, therefore allowing you to change it in a positive way.

Topic 2: The Patterns of Fear

In addition to the pattern of problems, we must examine the pattern of fear. Fear is a serious kind of distortion that prevents one from seeing the forest for the trees. We are going to just look at the surface of fear and how it impacts transformations, enterprise behavior, and its consequences. We talk more about fear in a future post, but here we’re going to talk about how you can’t see the pattern of fear that is the actual problem behind your actions.

Behavior, especially corporate behavior, is primarily fear-based, and that behavior repeats itself in patterns that are recognizable. Fear of risk, fear of retribution, fear of underperforming, fear of upsetting people, fear of failure. Fear itself is a pattern that repeats itself and surfaces in the context of many situations. Remember our lead quote, “Context is relatability and relatability results in patterns. Context is the situation within which something exists or happens.”

Fear patterns are behaviors that repeat themselves within a workday, department, transformation, enterprise, etc. that are based on your obsession with what will happen next. To pull from the Fire Drill article again, the quote “If you have your boss, the CEO, and your customers all barking at you, your first reaction and desire is to make that all stop”. That desire to make it go away is fear, and if you’re reacting to fear, it is a pattern. An organization that is constantly in Fire Drill mode is a fear-based organization who is caught in a fear pattern. They’re reacting to the fear of “something” and they are doing it every day.

Additionally, companies that don’t adjust their business operating model to support transformation investments are likely doing so out of the fear of the results if the effort doesn’t go as planned. This fear is a pattern, and in this case, the inability to and repetitive nature in which projects are run WITHOUT executive sponsorship and WITHOUT organization, supporting changes and incentives for the new plan is a pattern of fear that repeats itself time and again and prevents these efforts from succeeding.

Fear patterns can easily be identified through risk models. A proper risk model will outline the items that people are afraid of. Look at the history of projects in your company and their success or failure. The items listed in your fear model will be repeated throughout history as the reasons for why these initiatives were unsuccessful.

What’s Next?

Next week we will dive deep into fear. We touched on it today, but the pattern of fear is the most important pattern of all and the one that is the hardest to spot, understand, and break.

If you are interested in learning how to successfully spot patterns that drive failure, follow my series and reach out with questions and feedback. As this series continues to unfold, it is sure to evolve. If there are specific topics or directions you’d like me to explore, I’d love to hear from you.

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This story was originally posted on LinkedIn.