6b. My Drim Journey: Part 2 (The Fractal Phenomenon)

How we made out first – and fundamental – discovery: The Fractal Phenomenon.

Click here for Part 1 of the saga.

Repeating Patterns

In Part 1, I shared the discovery that apparently disparate and competing thinking methodologies (like the Theory of Constraints (TOC), Systems Dynamics and Systems Thinking; TRIZ and ASIT; NLP and Tony Robbins; Lateral Thinking and Creative Thinking) have more in common than in difference.

And that Lynne and I began to see similarities and commonality that we hadn’t seen before.

It was a very exciting discovery – and I found that I got better and better at seeing previously invisible patterns across what I had, until then, regarded as very disparate domains.  I think that the transition was easier for Lynne, than it was for me!

The Fractal Phenomenon

Challenging situations are made up of repeating patterns.

We discovered that the patterns repeated throughout and across domains – and at both micro and macro levels.  So we called the discovery the Fractal Phenomenon.  (Fractals are patterns that repeat endlessly at different resolutions.)

Most people think of computer-generated patterns when they think of fractals, but fractal patterns occur everywhere in nature: think of ferns, honeycombs, coastlines and snowflakes.

Here‘s a wikipedia article, if you want to explore the idea further.  You may also want to google the Golden Ratio and Fibonacci sequences, to get another perspective on the idea.

A few years later we came up with a more accessible name for The Fractal Phenomenon: The Repeating Patterns Phenomenon.

An example from the insurance industry

To illustrate the Fractal Phenomenon, the most dominant problem pattern we found in the insurance industry was “It’s impossible to know, ahead of time what you need to know to make an informed decision”.

I saw this pattern first within a Claims Department – my first exposure to the personal insurance industry (how do we determine quickly and reliably if the customer has a valid insurance claim?) – and then realised that it applied to Underwriting, as well.  And to customers.  And advisers.  And the entire insurance and reinsurer business.  And, in a slightly more general form, to the entire financial services industry.  And to the entire concept of risk.  And design and innovation.

The Claims Solution – targeting this problem – reduced Claims backlogs dramatically and enabled Claims Specialists to make over 60% of the claims decisions that had previously taken three weeks, in under 15 minutes, on the phone.  But more on this later.

Discovery: Education might make it harder to see patterns

We noticed that our children – who were very young at the time – seemed to see the patterns more easily than we could – almost effortlessly, in fact.  Was this because their minds were more open – or was something deeper going on?

On reflecting on my own education, I realised that, from an early age, my education had primarily focused on analysis (trying to make sense of things by breaking them down into their component parts) and on creating finer and finer distinctions.

Analysis is a great tool, but could our dependence on it – to the exclusion of nearly everything else – be hurting us?

See if the following has the same effect in your brain as it seems to in so many other peoples’ brains:

From early Kindergarten days, we were asked, “What’s the difference between 2 and 3; red and blue and; apples and oranges?”  We were never asked, “What’s the same about 2 and 3; red and blue and; apples and oranges?”

Did you also get a jolting feeling in your brain halfway through the previous paragraph?  Read it again, if you like: you’ll probably get the same sensation again.

There are many similarities between these seemingly distinctive things – and the more you look the more you see.  Most things have more in common than they have in difference: way more.  Yet we’re blind to those similarities: perhaps because we haven’t practiced looking for similarities nearly as much as we’ve practiced looking for differences; perhaps because similarity is boring if we don’t understand its significance.

Implications?

Is it any wonder that conflict is easier and more common than collaboration; war easier than peace; and unkindness and bigotry more “natural” than kindness, acceptance and encouragement?

The more you practice the better you get.

We’ll go into the Fractal Phenomenon in greater depth in due course – it’s a fascinating and mind-bending idea: I can’t wait to unravel some of it for you – but the next few posts will introduce a simple method for finding those elusive repeating patterns.