Spotting Patterns on the Fly: A Conversation with Birders David Sibley and Julia Yoshida

Recognizing and anticipating change in industry patterns is a core competence for companies today, allowing managers to capitalize on opportunities before they are apparent to others. Yet, companies are far from mastering how to recognize such patterns, especially at the strategic level, where information is usually less profuse and much less precise. Pattern recognition is not a new skill, though, at least not to people outside the business world. Since antiquity, naturalists have relied on their ability to spot patterns to make sense of their surroundings. Surprisingly, there is much businesspeople can learn from bird watching in terms of the cognitive demands pattern recognition requires. To learn more, HBR spoke with David Sibley, perhaps the nation's foremost bird watcher and illustrator, and Julia Yoshida, a birder since 1965 and a physician at the Lahey Clinic in Burlington, Massachusetts. Sibley explains how expert birders draw on a wealth of tacit knowledge built up over the years to make identifications in a matter of seconds: "Once you've mastered common patterns, the real trick is to educate yourself about where discrepancies are most likely to appear--and to concentrate your attention on those areas." Although so fast as to be almost unconscious, the process he describes seems to be as methodical as one of Yoshida's medical diagnoses. According to Yoshida, "I don't think it's a eureka moment at all. It's a methodical process."

• Psychology and neuroscience
• Strategy formulation
• Problem solving
• Job interviews