What does it mean that repetition signals a pattern?

When the same structure appears three or more times, treat it as a pattern worth naming — not a coincidence to dismiss.

Example: An engineering lead notices the same three symptoms before every production outage: a spike in 99th-percentile latency, a flurry of retry storms, and a deploy within the last four hours. The first time it happened she called it bad luck. The second time she felt deja vu. The third time she wrote it down: 'pre-outage triad.' Now her team has a runbook triggered by those three signals, and they catch incidents before customers do.

Try this: Open your calendar, journal, or project tracker. Scan the last 30 days for any event, reaction, or outcome that happened three or more times. Write each recurrence on its own line with the date it occurred. Pick the one with the highest stakes and write a single sentence describing the structure: 'When [trigger], then [response/outcome].' You now have a candidate pattern.