The Key to Problem Solving: Correctly Identifying Continuous, Periodic, and Sporadic Patterns - Part 1

The Importance of Pattern Recognition in Problem Solving

Pattern recognition is a fundamental skill across the animal kingdom, enabling creatures to survive and thrive.

Modern humans, with our advanced five (or six) senses, process an incredible amount of information. Our senses and cognitive abilities excel at recognising patterns. This skill is vital, whether it’s a gazelle spotting a leopard in the grass or a shark identifying prey by its swim pattern.

However, what sets us apart from other animals is our capacity for reasoning. We can think logically and intelligently. We can establish WHY patterns happen. And WHY patterns are sometimes interrupted. We don’t just react to patterns; we analyse them. We seek to understand why patterns occur and why they sometimes deviate.

However, in the modern age, we’re increasingly taught to think within our education or professional training framework. What happens when we fail to recognise a pattern of unusual, irregular, or sporadic behaviour? Or… if we notice a pattern, how good are we at assessing likely causes with an adequate mental framework or process that leads us to a solution?

The answer is… we’re pretty damn good at it. Our training, intuition, and intelligence, as you may have heard me say many times before, can solve a LOT of problems. But…, when those faculties fail, we need something else. We need a new way of approaching a problem to find a solution efficiently, rather than reverting to ‘trial and error’ or any other inefficient mechanism to get us to the end goal.

That’s where pattern recognition can be incredibly useful. This article is about how to use pattern recognition to accelerate the problem-solving process.

Unfortunately, most people don’t understand pattern recognition fundamentals and take an ad hoc approach rather than following some structure in a process.

Obviously, you don’t want that to be you. You want to be able to identify patterns and pattern types and solve problems… so… read on…

First up, patterns can vary across different dimensions. It could be a physical pattern, an incident pattern, or a time pattern.

But today, I want to focus on the way we work across the three types of patterns you will recognise.

Continuous, periodic, and sporadic patterns. Understanding the simple difference between these pattern types and the kinds of things they indicate as potential causes is ABSOLUTELY crucial to solving problems quickly and efficiently.

The Three Types of Patterns

Continuous Patterns:

Continuous patterns are easiest to identify when an issue is persistent. For example, your application, product, machine, or whatever it is… is continually working or not working the way it should be—it’s degraded or not working in some way, or it could be completely broken.

But a continuous pattern also refers to any incident where something breaks every time you turn it on. It immediately fails, and that is also considered a continuous pattern.

Doctors use this extensively when performing a diagnosis on a patient. (When did you notice the rash? Six weeks ago? Okay, have you changed anything in your diet or anything you’re putting on your skin? Yes, I changed my brand of shaving cream. Voila! There’s a high chance we can attribute a cause.)

Periodic Patterns:

These patterns are characterised by deviations from standard, and they occur at regular intervals. Something breaks, but it goes back to completely normal operation each time you restart the machine, system or process. Or it goes back to functioning normally entirely by itself.

Also, because it’s periodic, you can predict when it will happen. For example, in one situation, a client had a server that would crash every Tuesday morning at 10:00 a.m. It was so accurate and on time that you could set your watch with it.

We knew it was going to happen again next Tuesday. It had been happening that way for quite some time, so it had a well-established periodic pattern… I'm sure your intuition is already coming up with possible causes!

Sporadic Patterns:

The most challenging to identify, sporadic patterns are intermittent and unpredictable. They are extremely similar to the periodic pattern except for one key element: You cannot predict when it will happen (hence the appearance of ‘randomness’).

It could happen three or four times today, completely disappear for another couple of days, then happen again, disappear for a week or more, and then happen again. That makes them tricky to solve.

In part 2 of this article, I’ll delve deep into the sporadic pattern (which is the most challenging pattern to resolve) and provide some essential tips that will help you diagnose potential causes and get to the bottom of your problems faster.

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