It has been a little over a year since Lehman Brothers went down. Although the recession is technically over, we all know that we have a
long road in front of us for the economy to get back, for unemployment
to go down and for consumers to feel confident again.
Many
industry experts have had a chance to comment since then on what
happened and what we should do now to get out of it. I stumbled upon
some interesting reading that I definitely recommend.
What
triggered our interest at FICO was the sudden abundance of papers from
industry analyst firm Gartner on a new concept called Pattern-Based
Strategy. It looked like a new trend was emerging across many
independent disciplines.
Pattern-Based Strategy
Pattern-Based
Strategy resonated with me from the get-go because it aligns
beautifully with the Decision Management concepts we have been
advocating for a few years. I am not saying that we had already
invented the wheel of course — I am not that arrogant! I was rather
impressed that our Decision Management perspective fitted quite well
within this framework, if I can use that term. By the same token, very
different perspectives such as Human Resources (which is the industry
my husband develops applications for) happen to fit beautifully as
well. Outside of our nest, I tried to challenge the concept with all
the industries or disciplines I knew quite well, and I inevitably came
up with the realization this was applicable and it was likely a winning
strategy. This is to some extent a business model of the survival of
the fittest strategy. Given my background in biology, how could I not
be drawn into it?
Survival of the fittest
Survival
of the fittest relies on two main concepts: constant changes
and natural selection based on best adaptation to the environment. In
pattern-based strategy, the mechanism removes some of the randomness of
the changes. Gartner advocates to proactively keep your senses alert,
on the lookout for new trends, so that you can adjust your behavior and
measure performance to make sure you will fit better in the new
environment. From that standpoint, it feels like pattern-based
strategy is like an “aware” survival of the fittest strategy. It is
clear that genes do not have any “awareness” — they change by chance
or by design “to change”, there is no intent of a better state. Selection is the only mechanism that will elect who makes it and who
doesn’t, assuming that the change is discriminant. The active pattern
seeking is obviously an addition to the survival of the fittest theory
— a brilliant one.
In
the new few days, I will go over the various aspects of pattern-based
strategy and link those to my favorite subject: Decision Management.
