
We are pattern recognition machines. It’s how we out-survived everything else on the planet trying to eat us. If you’re not sure, take a look at the make of this care. I’m pretty sure that (a) you can read it as Dacia, and (b) those letters have almost no relationship at all to the shapes for letters you were taught at school.
You can use that astonishing ability to help people remember your content in your presentations. Your teachers did it at school after all. If if you’re in the UK your driving instructor almost certainly used phrases like “tyres and tarmac” to remind you how far/close you should park on the side of the road. What about “peep and creep” for coming out of blind junctions…
I’m 61 and I learned to drive when I was 18 – those things still stick with me… because they have pattern.
What sorts of things count as patterns?
A question I often ask people in live training is if I put up a list of random words, could they memorise over 100 of them in a ten minute coffee-break. Nope. But if I arranged those words to form the lyric of a Katy Perry song (setting aside any dislike of Ms Perry!) are your chances of pulling this off higher or lower. Always higher.
Because if a line finishes in ‘white’ you know the next line is going to finish in ‘fight’ or ‘might’ or ‘right’ etc.
Rhymes are a form of pattern.
So are acronyms. I’m not going to use this particular one in a gig I’ve got in October but in the process of creating that keynote speech I came up with three types of stories:
- Heroic
- Relational
- Teaching
The acronym HRT is going too stick in the mind of lots of people, particularly those of a certain age and gender.
Chances are it’s going to stick in your mind too, now. 😉

Graphics can work too. A good graph tells a story and gives a visual pattern. Take the example on the left (originally here). It’s pretty clear that the general trend in the number of people over the age of 16 in the UK is on a strong downward trend.
And not only does it show the trend (the pattern!) so clearly it does that so well you can spot outliers – something funny happened just before 1995, didn’t it. That’s the power of a good graphic for sticking something in someone’s head. Your audience might not remember the details (they won’t anyway, no matter what you do!) but they trend will stick with them because we’re all, at heart, visual animals.
Perhaps the most complicated type of pattern is the story. The whole point of a story is that we learn from it, get entertained perhaps, and feel more warmly towards the person telling it, but at its core a story is not just a set of random events – it’s a structured series of events, joined together by cause and effect. That, pretty much, is a working definition of a type of pattern.
To recap Rhymes, Acronyms, Graphics/Graphs, Stories – see what I did there?!
So what’s next?
That’s up to you. How you use that information is out of my control. I will leave you with one parting thought though, that the RAGS acronym was something I’ve just created especially for this post over less than the top inch of a cup of tea. I know I’m more used to thinking this way than most people, but if I can do it, anyone can. Trust me, I’m not special.