Insights

Seeing Patterns We’ve Never Seen Before

Aug 25, 2025 - Daniel Goodenough, Jill Taylor
When faced with challenge, most of us instinctively search for patterns. How did this happen? Where have I seen this before? Our brains are wired to connect new experiences to old ones. For thousands of years, that worked—because life didn’t change much.
Today, it’s different.
The patterns emerging now are often unprecedented. The pandemic and the Great Resignation made this clear: 4 million people resigning in a single week was not a repeat of anything we had seen before. Yet business-as-usual frames had us miss what was incoming—the collective hunger for meaning and the possibility of new ways to live and work.
The risk of relying only on past patterns is that we end up blind to what’s arriving from the future. The Overton window explains this in politics: staying within a narrow frame of what’s “acceptable” means we miss the unexpected. The same applies in business and leadership. Sometimes the window itself creates a kind of magical thinking that ignores reality.

The opportunity lies in how we use our attention. Neuroscience shows we have two networks at play:

  • The dorsal network keeps us focused on tasks, filtering out anything that doesn’t fit.
  • The ventral network opens us to what’s unexpected—breakthroughs, epiphanies, fresh insights.

Training ourselves to notice through the ventral network allows us to ask new questions, to see patterns we might otherwise dismiss, and to open to perspectives not bound by the past.

The real edge in business now may be this: learning to differentiate between repeating patterns and unprecedented ones—and being willing to inhabit the frames that allow us to see what is incoming.

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5:37 min video
Frames and Pattern Recognition
Differentiating patterns of the past from unprecedented incoming patterns is a new edge in business.
Differentiating patterns of the past from unprecedented incoming patterns is a new edge in business.

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