Like it or not, much of our behaviour can be explained by instincts or as Google defines it, our “natural or intuitive way of acting or thinking.” Indeed, instincts are a type of pattern that is built into us, hardcoded if you will. These include sexual desire and attraction, hunger and the assimilation of food, the dizzy feeling you have when looking over the edge of an extremely high building or cliff, and the strange sensation you get when someone doesn’t quite seem right or appears to be lying to you.

In fact, today, as I was sitting at my desk I noticed a man dressed in high vis gear while talking on his phone walking down my driveway. As soon as he spotted me sitting in my office staring back at him, he quickly turned around and walked back up the driveway. At first glance, this could be disregarded as someone that got the wrong address or a trade worker wanting to do some maintenance. The strange thing about this guy is that he did exactly the same thing last week. While it seemed strange last week I was in the middle of a client call when it happened so I couldn’t chase him down to find out who he was and what he wanted. Today, however, I was free, so I promptly followed him up the street. He continued to have what looked like quite an animated conversation while he was walking and after about 30 metres he put his phone in his pocket, he then turned around and saw me following. Without skipping a beat, he kept walking, pulled his phone back out of his pocket and picked up with the animated conversation. By this stage, I was pretty certain this guy was up to no good and wasn’t really having a conversation with anyone. Cautious but curious, I kept following him to see if he was going to get in a car or truck….assuming he was a tradie. He got to a street corner and stopped so I kept walking. He stood with his back to me continuing to ‘talk’ on his phone for about 2mins. I waited patiently maintaining 1.5 metres of a distance of course. He put his phone away and turned to me with a steely look in his eye. I asked, “ Are you alright there mate?”. Cool as a cucumber, he said that he was waiting for a delivery and needed to figure out if the truck could turn around in our driveway. This might be a plausible explanation on a country road but not for a house that’s on a six-lane, divided road Highway such is ours! Predictably, it turned out that there was no truck, just his van that is most likely full of stolen goods from other properties he managed to successfully ‘hit’. I managed to capture a pic of his van without him noticing me and promptly reported his registration details to the police.

In the above example, it’s easy to see how my interpretation of a behavioural pattern triggered an instinctual response for me to act. Noticing patterns in behaviour, allows you to appropriately take action when you see something that doesn’t quite ‘fit’. The problem with this is, now, every time I see someone in high vis gear walk down our driveway, I’ll be more vigilant in my assessment of their intentions. In some cases, like mine, it’s probably a good thing but in others - like soldiers returning from war- it can lead to issues such as anxiety, depression or PTSD.

Pattern recognition is a powerful tool to evaluate what to do next, and in many assessments used by organisations to select candidates based on their ‘fluid intelligence’, tests of abstract reasoning examine your ability to spot patterns and determine the correct response in the sequence. In this way, correctly interpreting patterns is a huge advantage for human beings both past and present….but I’m not so sure about the future. Patterns are thought to be behaviours that have evolved to help us survive and succeed in our natural environment. While this is true for the majority of the time, our environment is changing more rapidly than our natural more intuitive ways of acting or thinking and therein lies the problem. Our environment barely resembles anything ‘natural’ anymore. We are walking around with some seriously powerful hardware in our heads (talking about our brains here) with an ever-changing environment that is becoming increasingly complex year on year. Our software (patterns and instincts) is in many ways, horribly outdated. This is the equivalent to playing the first version of space invaders on a modern PC. Unless the program has been updated and adapted to the new operating system, it simply won’t work or will be compromised at the very least.

While there are our baseline instinctual patterns that are largely automatic and often, irrelevant, the future belongs to those that can begin to write their own code, design new patterns that serve as behavioural blueprints and set the example for others. We typically know these people as ‘leaders’ in modern society but I like to think of them as ‘Pattern Programmers’ or ‘Pattern Hackers’. These people have learned the art of programming their own behaviours to meet the needs of their environment. It takes effort, discipline and tonne of self-awareness but the result is a ripple that grows exponentially along with their contributions to society. A recent example is Bill Gates, who is in my opinion, one of the greatest pattern hackers of all time. He has the ability to identify patterns in behaviour and extrapolate what that means for industries, countries and in the case of COVID-19, the world. If you haven’t already watched it, have a look at Bill’s Ted Talk from 2015 where he outlines the risk of a global pandemic and the world’s inability to respond to it appropriately.

The truth is, while not everyone will learn how to ‘write their own code’ so to speak, we are all walking around with pretty much the same hardware in our heads. It’s the programming that you do that’s going to set you apart…and like anything hard, it’s something you can learn. You’re not always going to get it right, but it’s time to evolve your ability to respond to your environment proactively because our inbuilt programming is no longer sufficient. Whether you have a suspicious character wanting to rob your house or want to be the next Bill Gates, I’m certain that if you consciously work on shaping your mindset and how you interpret your environment, you’ll be better at recognising patterns that will help you succeed.

If you’re interested in exploring your own patterns more, download my pattern recognition worksheet and send me a note if you need any help with it.

References

Bill Gates’ Ted Talk 2015 - https://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates_the_next_outbreak_we_re_not_ready?language=en#t-128669

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