Preemptive OverreactionsHow patterns make us safe and dangerous.

How did the group of zombie come up with their business?

They brainstormed.

Brains.

You know those things that allow us to love, dance and tickle the chin of random friendly dogs. Bloody brilliant, aren’t they? They give us the illusion of control. Essentially, without your brain, you are but a bony bag of meat and chewy bits. The reason humans have become the undisputed heavyweight champions of self-determination is down to our brains.

Our ability to recognise patterns and use them to guide our interactions with the world is genuinely astounding. This isn’t pattern recognition like the pick-a-pair games from childhood. They are rapid, almost magical processes which take place, for the most part, without us even noticing. Languages are a series of complex pattern-matching processes.

Once your brain has figured out the code and understands how the patterns relate to the world around us, you can use it to communicate with other people you have no relationship with. As long as the pattern matches, you can swap ideas, innovate or just agree that Stewart Lee is indeed the 41st best stand-up comedian ever.

We make rapid judgments based on the information we get, informed by past assumptions. We pick partners, houses, jobs, and pizza toppings based on what we know and how comfortable we feel based on past outcomes.

This process is so well developed that we see the face of Jesus in toast and swear that the bloke in the chip shop is Elvis, even though a quick pause would cast doubt on both assumptions.The speed at which we can recognise, categorise, understand and influence the patterns around us is essentially what we think of as intelligence.

How We Recognise (and Miss) Hazards

Pattern recognition, being central to how we function as members of the human race, is also a big part of how we recognise threats. People who are lucky enough to have the time and funding to research this sort of stuff consistently show that people see what their previous experience has taught them to look for. The flip side is that it also creates massive blind spots when the risk lies beyond our own life experiences.

There are some things that are hardwired into us. It is why many of us are scared of things with sharp claws and big teeth. I’ve never had to share a lift with a rabid dog, but instinct tells me it wouldn’t make for a comfortable ride between floors.

We, humans that is, have the rare ability to imagine what might happen based on what we know about the world. I can reasonably predict that if I took a leap of faith off the edge of the Grand Canyon, the outcome would be somewhat negative, assuming continuing to breathe is a positive trait. Even just witnessing what are, strangely, referred to as near-misses helps us recognise new patterns to apply to similar hazardous situations in the future. Those without similar experiences in similar environments are more likely to miss the signs that show danger is on the doorstep.

There is also a tendency toward overconfidence among those with extensive experience, just not in the way that you have been told by your friendly neighbourhood safetyman. Experience does not equal complacency. What pushes people to exceed competence is the celebration of risk-taking, or when task-related training pushes the practitioner’s skills beyond what could be normally useful. Teaching a builder to do a backflip may result in some impressive worksite gymnastics, but is unlikely to make the work safer.

There was a time when commercial airline pilots were taught ‘advanced aircraft manoeuvres’. This was reversed when it was noted that pilots were using these skills, because they could rather than because they were the best course of action.

Mountain guides have been studied, and it was concluded that they are celebrated for their skills, which then encourage greater risk-taking, and the cycle repeats right up to the point where confidence and the pressure to perform a service override sound judgment. I’d recommend reading “Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer for a gripping and detailed account of how this played out on Everest in 1996.It is easy for us to rely on routine and past success. Using our brains requires a lot of energy, so it makes sense to repeat what works. In some contexts, this is perfect, and we potter along happily without issue. This falls apart when a gorilla appears in the middle of a basketball game.

For those who don’t know, a series of experiments about perception was designed by a couple of chaps called Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris. These included a video, in which the observers were asked to count the number of passes by one team on a basketball court. At one point, a Gorilla, probably not a real one, walks through the game. About 50 % of the people missed the gorilla completely. They were blind to its presence, even though they were looking at it. Motorcyclists know this feeling well.

What we can learn from this research is that:

The brain actively filters input; what you’re focused on determines what you register, not what’s objectively there.

We are really confident we will notice if something obvious happens. This failure to understand how our own brains work also means that even if we know the science, we think that it can’t possibly apply to us.

We assume what we see is a live-action film of what is happening in front of us, when in reality, we spend our lives looking through a toilet roll tube and rely on our brains to fill in the gaps.

We are also massively influenced by what those around us say is there. If we are the only ones who spot the contextually dubious primate, when we tell those who missed it what was there, we are likely to change our minds and agree that we are mistaken.

I once genuinely witnessed someone dressed in a full wolf costume, complete with a realistic animated head and big grandma eating teeth, cross the road while I waited for a train to pass. To this day, when I tell people of this encounter, they look at me like I must have been having some type of 70’s acid flashback.

All of this means that what we see is systematically unreliable. Our own eyes aren’t to be trusted.

When Shortcuts Become Normal

Sociologist Diane Vaughan coined the term “normalisation of deviance”: the process by which a clearly unsafe practice comes to be considered normal if it does not immediately cause a catastrophe.

Personally, I don’t like the phrase. It sounds like something a Minister would try to scare their Sunday congregation with, but the concept is valid.

During this process, which slowly permeates like an alien egg in the early stages of a horror film, early warning signs can be misinterpreted, ignored, or missed completely.

The early work in this area followed the Challenger Space Shuttle tragedy. The search for an explanation found repeated decisions by NASA to launch missions into the vacuum of space, despite shuttle design flaws. Over time, NASA became so accustomed to cruising the boundary of failure that they were blind to the potential outcomes. If you are successful and celebrated, you become invincible, at least in your own mind.

This is pattern recognition working perfectly. We recall that nothing bad happened the last time, so we are confident nothing bad will happen this time. The pattern we have always experienced is one we will always experience. The pattern shows us this, until it doesn’t. If the decisions we make have no consequences, the brain updates our operating system: this is acceptable, this is normal, well done, you give yourself a pat on the back, carry on. If we stop to solve the perceived problem, spend the time and allocate the resources to fix the issue, there isn’t a failure. What there is, though, is an expenditure of time and energy. It’s rare that this is celebrated. It’s hard to prove a negative.

The first rule of the Dunning-Kruger club is that you don’t know you are in it.

When the stars align, or maybe it should be black holes, and things do go wrong, pattern recognition continues to shape outcomes. How incidents are investigated and who gets blamed fit into patterns, whether we intend it or not.

MacLean and Dror (2023) in the Journal of Safety Research found that even professional investigators, when shown basic details of a serious industrial incident, will hypothesise what the outcomes should be even before looking at the evidence. Unsurprisingly, they, like nearly everyone else, have a human error bias. Investigators overemphasise dispositional qualities, such as inattentiveness or carelessness, while underestimating situational factors, such as time pressure or impractical protocols. As Yoda says, the force of attribution bias is strong with them.

The tools used in investigations entrench bias more than they encourage curiosity. MacLean and Read (2019), also in the Journal of Safety Research, found that even expert investigators using a cause analysis chart allocated significantly more cause to the person involved than those given the freedom to follow narratives as if they were a comedy improvisation troupe. Using pre-ordained paths resulted in fewer, not more opportunities to learn about how the event actually occurred.

Hindsight bias, the undisputed heavyweight champion of the bias world, increases the problem. Once an outcome is known, the brain retrospectively decides things are way more predictable than they are in the moment. Humans are absolutely excellent at judging. We centre our own experiences and are really confident in how we would react in every situation. Other people, though, are stupid, right? I would never make a bad judgment, but they are just accidents waiting to happen.

Risk Anchoring: what you know is all there is.

Our previous experiences create massive, weighty and hard to winch up, anchors. These reference points can either sharpen or distort our perception of risk. Research published in 2024 found that people can’t reliably analyse complexity, so we rely on concepts and patterns that have been imprinted on us. Counterintuitively, past accident and injury experiences can cause us to self-generate these ideas, which in turn decrease risk perception and increase the likelihood of something going sideways.

Experience does make work safer, but, as with most things in life, there is nuance. You might have done the same task a thousand times without incident. This becomes a deeply embedded pattern. Patterns reduce mental load and increase autonomy and muscle memory. All signs say “this is safe”. That increase in brain energy conservation makes it harder, not easier, to perceive changes that might emerge as negative outcomes.

Who gets trusted gets influence.

Patterns shape how we see each other. In societies, including small constrained ones like organisations, the patterns form the basis of trust. When we communicate, move, and respond to instruction in ways that others read as reliable, trust forms. People who deviate from those norms, apparently, this includes your author, dear reader. I like to think of these outliers as an elite category of humans, but we can unintentionally trigger unease in those we come into contact with. First impressions are indeed a powerful thing and can be a particularly heavy anchor for many.

This has direct consequences for the neurodivergent in society. A study by Longmire et al. in Human Resource Management described what they termed relational incongruence in neurodiverse workgroups. A phrase that only an HR professional could love. What it boils down to is that a neurotypical manager may evaluate an employee's performance based on a narrow (but completely normal) perception of what constitutes a high-quality connection with colleagues. Without explicitly stating what this pattern looks like, a neurodivergent employee is more likely to rely on formal task completion as the primary indicator of their contribution to the workplace. You see the issue. We aren’t all the same; assuming we are ends badly for all parties.

A systematic review of 56 studies across 12 countries found that neurotypical expectations of behaviour often lead to both disciplinary actions and the exclusion of neurodivergent employees’ voices. The majority of studies found organisational barriers to inclusion or negative experiences for neurodivergent staff members. So much for workplace harmony, eh?

Being a square peg surrounded by round holes.

When your patterns don’t match what everyone around you expects, then you suppress who you are and attempt to become what you think others want. Commonly referred to as masking, it is, in reality, the stressful and energy-intensive act of suppressing who you are in order to perform to others in a way that allows society's outliers to be accepted.

Research consistently finds that masking increases the risk of burnout, stress, and depression, and has resulted in neurodivergent employees leaving the workforce entirely.

Stigma remains a major barrier to not just employment but also a sense of belonging for neurodivergent workers. Differences in communication style contribute to social difficulties, and more than half of neurodivergent employees in some studies have experienced workplace discrimination.

Sadly, but understandably, given the general lack of understanding and the recent war on anything seen as accommodating diversity, disclosure rates remain low. A significant proportion of neurodivergent employees choose not to disclose their diagnosis at work, citing fear that doing so will change how they are perceived and treated. Disclosure rates vary considerably across studies, but the fear of discrimination is the most consistent reason for non-disclosure.

What should we do?

So what can we do about all this? Well, I have some thoughts (of course you do Mick), but the first thing to point out is to have some curiosity. No one expects (the Spanish Inquisition) everyone to know everything, nor would any reasonable person think they can read the minds of others'.

When you encounter someone whose approach to a task, a conversation or a relationship doesn’t fit your own pattern, pause. The most difficult and yet the easiest thing to do is ask without judgment. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that if you can develop that skill, it is the most important thing you will do. None of us will ever be perfect, so we also have to accept that we will make mistakes, which can hurt others and ourselves, but that shouldn’t stop us from continuing to try to improve.

Safety Management Systems

Design the system to be used, not audited. Yes, we need to train investigators and build learning into how we understand work, but none of this will help if it is supported by lots of dense documents designed to support an audit requirement.

Build the safety management system at a level that works with the context of the risk you are managing. If what you do is linear and generally predictable in nature, design constraints with those who do the work that make it easier to do the right thing than the wrong one. Where the work you do is genuinely complex, then understand where the boundaries of knowledge are within the organisation and build in barriers that force people to pause and consult instead of just ploughing on. Celebrate when this action is taken. Develop a process of meaningful conflict. Wholesale agreement won’t create innovation, nor will it lead to learning or improvement in the process. We don’t have to agree on the best way forward; in fact, I’d suggest designing experiments to test competing ideas and see which one emerges as the most suitable for your specific organisation.

Include people, even when it makes you uncomfortable.

Divergent groups of people working towards a common goal lead to innovative outcomes. Yes, sometimes these ideas will make us feel uncomfortable, but that is OK. Comfortable people rarely innovate. All your employees will have individual strengths. We all have pattern recognition based on our lives to this point. When we come together, these individual experiences diverge and come together in new and novel ways. When given the opportunity to emerge, innovative problem-solving approaches are endlessly valuable in modern organisations. Progress requires moving beyond ingrained concepts of what is right toward a leadership understanding of diversity and complexity, training tailored to these realities, and broader cultural shifts in how performance and contribution are measured.

Sustained interaction on a level playing field between members of different groups will reduce bias and, given enough exposure, improve relationships. This isn’t my idea; this is what the empirical research shows. Instead of avoiding people in the workplace who you find have uncomfortable positions or approaches, if you interact with these folks, you and they will gain knowledge and empathy, and reduce anxiety. Representation in leadership positions and teams gradually expands what the brain treats as its baseline for normal interaction, and this shift happens measurably over time. The more you surround yourself at work with people who are like you, the more entrenched your views and the more risk you expose yourself to through your narrow decision-making processes.

Pattern recognition is not a flaw. It is to be celebrated and embraced as one of the most powerful brain processes we have. The thing we need to work on is bringing this fact to the surface and not suppressing what we know in order to build false comfort. Currently, pattern recognition operates largely outside of our day-to-day awareness. That doesn’t stop it from shaping what hazards we see, what risks we think are acceptable, who we blame when things go wrong, and who we trust or exclude from our conversations.

We have all built instincts based on the world in which our brains evolved. These instincts have been remarkably successful in getting us to this point. Overriding our instincts to allow innovation is never easy. We are designed to save energy.

This is why things like A.I. are so alluring. ‘Create something impressive without putting in much effort, you say, bring it on’. We can, and should, improve and shape the environments in which we work to create inclusion for everyone. Through innovation, we can deconstruct traditional approaches to people management and safety system design and rebuild them through experimentation, challenge and repurposing.

We need to look at current leadership practices and push through comfortable dichotomies that do nothing more than restrict change.

You don’t have to change your values to allow others to live by theirs, but you do have to expose yourself to new patterns in order to learn.

Reference List

Vaughan, D. (1996). The Challenger Launch Decision. University of Chicago Press.MacLean, C.L. (2022). Cognitive bias in workplace investigation: Problems, perspectives and proposed solutions. Applied Ergonomics. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apergo.2022.103860MacLean, C.L. & Dror, I.E. (2023). Measuring base-rate bias error in workplace safety investigators. Journal of Safety Research, 84, 108–116. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jsr.2022.10.012MacLean, C.L. & Read, J.D. (2019). An illusion of objectivity in workplace investigation: The cause analysis chart and consistency, accuracy, and bias in judgments. Journal of Safety Research, 68, 139–148. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jsr.2018.12.008Sedlar, N., Irwin, A., Martin, D. & Roberts, R. (2023). A qualitative systematic review on the application of the normalisation of deviance phenomenon within high-risk industries. Journal of Safety Research, 84, 290–305. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jsr.2022.11.005Hazard Recognition in Construction Workers. PubMed (2020). https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33114347/Why Workers Generate Biased Risk Perceptions. PMC (2024). https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11410718/Longmire, N. et al. (2024). Relational incongruence in neurodiverse workgroups. Human Resource Management. https://doi.org/10.1002/hrm.22248Lindsay, S. et al. (2021). Disclosure and workplace accommodations for autistic employees. Disability and Rehabilitation. https://doi.org/10.1080/09638288.2019.1635658Vargas-Salas, O. et al. (2025). Neurodivergence and the Workplace: A Systematic Review. Sage Journals. https://doi.org/10.1177/10522263251337564 (