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Article 7: Pattern Spotting

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This is the seventh article in my 8-week series exploring foundational systems thinking concepts, written for the 2025 RE-AMP Systems Thinking Academy. Whether you’re following along with the series or diving deep into systems practice, this article explores Pattern Spotting — a practice for noticing and sensing emerging patterns in Complex Adaptive Systems. Learn more about the Academy and register here.
Originally published in my blog

Pattern Spotting: Seeing What’s Emerging in Complex Adaptive Systems

As social system mappers, we’re not just documenting networks — we’re engaging in living, evolving systems. Maps give us snapshots, but it’s the patterns revealed through those maps (and through the relationships they represent) that matter most.
Pattern Spotting is a practice for shifting our attention from isolated data points toward flows, relationships, and emergent tendencies. It helps us practice what HSD calls Pattern Logic — a way of perceiving systems through movement and connection, not just categories or counts.
This matters because in Complex Adaptive Systems, we don’t encounter tidy, linear cause-and-effect chains. We encounter shifting constellations. As the Stacey Matrix reminds us, different parts of a system may be in different zones at the same time: some stable and predictable, others in emergence or even turbulence. Pattern Spotting helps us read across these zones, seeing both anchors and surprises.

Why Pattern Spotting Matters for Mappers

When people first encounter a Social System Map (SSM), the sheer amount of data can be overwhelming: Where do I start? What’s the point?
Pattern Spotting gives a clear place to begin in a single view. It’s not about finding “the right answer,” it’s about training our pattern-spotting muscles together — and every round reliably produces fresh insight or curiosity that leads to next steps in and beyond the map.
When groups do this together, they:
  • Realize that different people notice different things — and that this diversity of attention is an asset.
  • Practice describing what they see (not debating what’s “true”), which builds shared attention and trust.
  • Experience the map as a living feedback tool, not a static picture — because noticing patterns naturally leads to meaning and action.
  • Reduce overwhelm by focusing on patterns first, then details where they matter.
In practice, even a short round of Pattern Spotting becomes a mini Adaptive Action cycle in baby steps:
  • What? — Using the Pattern-Spotters, participants name what they see in one view of the map.
  • So what? — They share interpretations, tensions, and hypotheses, surfacing different meanings and questions.
  • Now what? — The group identifies a small, safe-to-try next step: maybe a new filter to explore in the map, a question to check with the network, or an attribute to add as new data.
Each round both builds capacity (we get better at noticing together) and produces value (we leave with something actionable). Over time, these cycles turn SSM sessions into a steady rhythm of shared noticing, learning, and moving forward.

The HSD Pattern-Spotter Activity

To strengthen this kind of attention, Human Systems Dynamics offers a simple but powerful exercise: the Pattern-Spotter. These prompts interrupt our default filters and invite new sightlines:
  • In general, I notice . . .
  • In general, I notice, but . . .
  • On one hand and on the other hand . . .
  • I am really surprised that . . .
  • I wonder . . .
Used in the context of mapping, these can open up fresh perception: noticing overlooked relationships, surfacing assumptions, and sparking conversations that deepen collective sensemaking.

Why This Matters for Working with Networks

For system mappers, Pattern Spotting is a discipline of using the map to see what is arising — not just what already exists.
  • It trains attention toward relationships and flows, not just categories.
  • It interrupts linear, mechanistic seeing by reframing data in terms of dynamics.
  • It builds shared awareness, as groups notice patterns together.
  • It turns maps into living feedback tools, supporting iteration and adaptive moves.
Practiced collectively, Pattern Spotting becomes a way of building fields of shared noticing. And that shared noticing can shift paradigms themselves — helping networks see, sense, and respond together in more life-giving ways.

The framework of Adaptive Action and the inquiry cycle of What? So What? Now What? described above are drawn from: Adaptive Action: Leveraging Uncertainty in Your Organization by Glenda Eoyang and Royce Holladay (Stanford University Press, 2013).

Next week: Article 8 explores the CDE Model — Containers, Differences, and Exchanges — the underlying dynamics that shape every complex adaptive system.
Article 7: Pattern Spotting - PreviousArticle 6: Attending to Our AttentionNext - Article 7: Pattern SpottingArticle 8: Containers, Differences, Exchanges

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