What Patterns Do You See?

Colleagues,
 
For the past two weeks we’ve been looking at how strategic leaders move from symptom to problem. The front end of that process focuses on expanding the possible underlying factors causing the symptom by:

• Identifying stakeholders.
• Generating many possible causes through the sunray activity.
• Exploring each sunray through the stair-stepping process.

 
The fourth step in the process is pattern matching. In pattern matching, we look at all of the stair-steps as a single whole. As we study everything we have written down, we look for:

• Connections
• Themes
• Loops
• Areas of promise

 
Connections exist when sunrays have ideas from the stairsteps that connect them together. The two things being connected aren’t identical but are related. 
 
Themes exist when the same idea occurs in different sunrays. 
 
Loops are present when reasoning becomes circular.
 
Areas of promise are the ideas we get from the patterns we see. An area of promise is a likely root problem. We may only have one area of promise, but with complex issues, there may be more than one root problem, leading to several areas of promise.
 
Tomorrow we’ll look at some examples.

Do good and be well,

​Frederick