How Pattern-based Thinking Gives Companies an Edge

If you’re predicting the outcome of a car crash, you don’t want to focus on the color of the vehicles — you want to focus on their relative weights and speeds.

If you’ve seen a problem you’ve never seen before, you try to analyze it in terms of the closest problem you have seen. You focus on essential elements looking for similarities.

Similarly, when solving a business problem, you look for the closest match you can find and focus on what’s most important and what’s different between the two problems. You focus on what is essential and find the best available match to the problem you are trying to solve.