Out of the Recession

-- Posted by Carole-Ann

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.  On 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.