If you have achieved chess master status, these patterns are pretty useful. If however, you have not achieved grand master status and want to play chess well, the patterns that you have in your head may not be that useful. You may, in fact, need to unlearn them.

But what patterns are you carrying with you that might be hindering your game? Probably not long chains of chess moves.

The patterns that I am referring to are patterns that are not directly related to chess. For example, some common patterns that may need to be addressed cover behavioral patterns such as, “How do I respond when attacked? ” “How do I act when I have a valuable resource (e.g., the queen); do I hold it tightly, or, am I willing to sacrifice it to achieve a larger aim?”

These patterns can be dysfunctional because they limit how we approach the world, and they constrain us without our being aware of it. We become overly cautious, or overly aggressive; unwilling to give in order to get.

In an organizational context, the question becomes, “are you stuck in ways of thinking that worked for you in the past but may not be the most effective for you today or into the future?” For us to continue learning, it is often critically important for us to unlearn perspectives, behaviors, or routines that have become habitual because they have proven successful in the past. This requires a learning mindset–a continual habit of curiosity; questioning, and seeking meaning from the world around us.

This is one of my favorite competencies.  Some of the most effective leaders that I have seen are incredible at seeing patterns in complex situations that others don’t pick up on.  The videos below are from an e-learning program I put together for a client some years ago.  

We are constantly bombarded with information.  At any given moment there are literally hundreds of things you could be paying attention to—the sound of my voice, the computer you are viewing this blog on, the voice of a coworker, a smell that reminds you of a favorite food.  To deal with the complexity of the world around us, we naturally adopt certain shortcuts.  One of the most fundamental shortcuts that we adopt is we look for patterns in the world around us.  If we didn’t look for regularities in the world around us, there would simply be too much information for us to process.  To deal with the potential information overload, we look for patterns.
 
Patterns can be thought of as constellations of events, information or symbols that are useful because they provide an organizing framework for information that may otherwise be difficult to understand or organize.  Patterns are the basic building blocks for our personal “mental maps”.
 
Think for a moment of the stellar constellations—if you take an interest in star gazing, they provide a useful shortcut for organizing a large number of stars into a smaller number of manageable and memorable star clusters.  In this case, patterns are useful because they reduce the complexity of the environment.  By knowing the location of a single star, you can rapidly locate other stars in a common constellation.  The configurations of stars that comprise a given constellation are clearly defined, and documented.  If you want to learn them, there are clear sources to consult. 
 
But in most areas of organizational life, the important constellations or patterns in the environment are not so clear.  They must be charted by perceptive leaders, who scan the environment, looking for signs and patterns relevant to the organization and its direction. 
 
Pattern recognition for a leader is the ability to identify connections between situations that are not obviously related.  With the ability to recognize patterns, you can reflect on a situation and use experience to help understand the problem. As a result, you do not treat each new situation as a new, unique problem.  Instead, you draw on your experience, make connections between past situations and the current situation, and see what is important.
 
Since we all use patterns to make sense of the world, the real question is not, “are you doing pattern recognition,” but, “are you doing it well?”
 
Experience is one of the most powerful tools for honing your pattern recognition abilities.  Psychologists have studied the way that people play chess—the ultimate game of strategy—to try and figure out what is it that separates chess masters from the rest of us.  What they found is that, through experience, the best chess players are able to see more patterns than others.  They have played so many games of chess that when they look at the board, they don’t just see pieces, they see patterns—rather than looking at a field of stars in the sky, they are seeing constellations.   What that means is that they can anticipate the consequences of various actions, and predict longer chains of moves—if I move here, you’ll move there, and I’ll move here, etc…
 
Adept leaders are able to do the same thing in the business environment. Looking at patterns of events, they can see patterns of events that have important implications for the organization.