THE IDEA
Three questions deep
When something goes wrong, we react to the event. The server crashed. The client left. The project went over budget. Events are immediate, concrete, and demanding. They pull our attention and our resources.
But events don’t happen in isolation. They’re part of patterns - recurring trends that repeat over time. Servers keep crashing. Clients keep leaving. Projects keep going over budget. Seeing the pattern changes the question from “how do we fix this?” to “why does this keep happening?”
And patterns don’t happen randomly. They’re produced by structures - the feedback loops, incentives, processes, and rules that reliably generate the same kind of outcome. The server keeps crashing because the team that maintains it is understaffed and the escalation process is broken. Clients keep leaving because the onboarding experience promises what the product doesn’t deliver. Projects keep going over budget because estimates are made to win approval, not to reflect reality.
Event-pattern-structure is a thinking discipline: don’t stop at what happened. Ask what keeps happening. Then ask what’s causing the pattern. Each level takes you closer to something you can change in a way that sticks.
IN PRACTICE
From the surface to the engine
A restaurant gets a bad review (event). The owner responds personally, offers a free meal, resolves the complaint. A month later, another bad review with the same complaint: long wait times (pattern). The owner starts paying attention to when waits are longest. It’s always Friday evenings, when the kitchen runs a special menu with more complex dishes while staffing stays the same (structure). The event-level response - apologising to one customer - was necessary but changed nothing. The structure-level response - simplifying the Friday menu or adding kitchen staff - changes the pattern.
A team has a heated argument in a meeting (event). The manager mediates. A month later, a different argument, different people, same dynamic: someone presents an idea, someone else dismisses it publicly, the presenter shuts down (pattern). The structure: meetings have no facilitation norms, the loudest voices dominate, and the incentive structure rewards appearing certain over being curious. Resolving individual arguments is event-level work. Redesigning how meetings run is structure-level work.
A country experiences a financial crisis (event). Governments respond with emergency measures. A decade later, another crisis with similar features (pattern). The structure: deregulated financial markets, misaligned incentive structures for risk-taking, and information asymmetries that hide systemic risk until it’s too late. Each crisis gets its own emergency response. The structure between crises gets the same policy that produced the last one.
WORKING WITH THIS
Building the habit
The practice is to ask three questions in sequence, every time you encounter a problem:
What happened? (Event.) Respond as needed. Fix the immediate issue. But don’t stop here.
What keeps happening? (Pattern.) Zoom out. Look at the last six months, the last year. Is this event part of a trend? If it’s happened more than twice with similar features, you’re looking at a pattern, and fixing individual events won’t change it.
What’s producing the pattern? (Structure.) This is where it gets useful and uncomfortable. Structures include processes, incentives, feedback loops, rules, norms, and resource allocations. They’re harder to see than events, harder to change than patterns, and far more powerful than either.
You don’t always have the power to change the structure. But knowing it exists changes how you spend your energy. If the structure is producing the pattern, and you can only address events, you at least know that your fix is temporary. You stop expecting permanent results from event-level interventions. And when you do get the chance to change a structure, you know exactly where to push.
THE INSIGHT
The line to remember
Fixing events is necessary. Seeing patterns is smart. Changing structures is where the real work lives.
RECOGNITION
When this is in play
You’re stuck at the event level when every problem feels like a new crisis requiring its own response. When you’re always fire-fighting but never reducing the number of fires. When post-mortems produce action items that address what went wrong this time without asking why it keeps going wrong. When a team is busy all the time and nothing is improving. When someone says “we’ve dealt with that” about something that’s going to happen again next month.