Loading up on patterns.
“The mark of the true professional in any field is the rich vocabulary of patterns, developed through years of formal education and especially through years of practical experience. The experienced doctor, the artist, the machinist, all have rich pattern vocabularies – Simon is now calling them ‘old friends.’ ” — Tom Peters and Robert Waterman Jr., In Search of Excellence
The Simon referred to in the quote is Herbert Simon, who received a Nobel Prize for his research into artificial intelligence. He found that one of the keys to getting computers to “think” like people is to load them up with common patterns so that they can make decisions like human experts. Simon’s research showed that expert chess masters had an average vocabulary of 50,000 chess patterns, while Class A players had only 2,000. More from Peters and Waterman:
“Chess players use decision-tree thinking, it appears, only in a very limited sense. They begin with the patterns: Have I seen this one before? In what context? What worked before?”
I’m cataloging the web and social media behaviors of over 500 architecture and engineering firms to better understand emerging best practices. I’ve cataloged over 100 firms so far. I’m beginning to see patterns, to the point I can almost predict the social media strategy, or lack thereof, of a firm by looking at the landing and about pages of their website.
I came across the preceding passage on the first day of my research. I’m starting to wonder– can the act of research itself lead to expertise? Is “loading up on patterns” a viable way to jumpstart understanding for humans as well as computers?
Hello, Christopher,
Producing a pattern of best practices across architecture and engineering firms is an example of how a professional can “stand on the shoulders of giants” and generate new insights from existing patterns.
Doing such organization, synthesis, and evaluation effectively requires sustained analysis of what individual best practices mean.
Probing those patterns for “know-why” is an effective way to accelerate expertise that you are already acquiring with your own direct experience, and observation. Indeed, the broad-based “know-why” you glean from studying best practices of other firms enables you to refine and express your direct experiences more effectively and contributes to how your colleagues perceive your expertise.
–John