Isaac Newton is credited with the observation that “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants” (which he actually appears to have borrowed from 12th Century philosopher Bernard of Chartres. see (Standing on the Shoulders of Giants). Computer scientist Richard Hamming was a bit less gracious, and perhaps more relevant, when he pointed out that “In computing, we mostly stand on each other’s feet.”
Both men were clear, however, that progress builds on the work that came before. This is an axiom in academic disciplines. Becoming an effective academic starts with long apprenticeships centered on immersion in the context of a field. You don’t get to play until you can demonstrate that you are familiar not just with the forms but the substance of what has come before.
Familiarity with context and history has not been so axiomatic outside of ivy-covered halls. For much the industrial revolution, the story has been about what is new, different, and innovative. Men of action were rooted in the now and facing tomorrow.
As more economic activity depends on those who think for a living, that equation has been changing. The old canard “those who can, do; those who can’t, teach” has lost much of its currency. At the very least, we need to stop standing on one another’s feet.
Claiming that your new product or service is new and different is easy to do if you don’t bother to look around you. Too many careers have been built on confident assertions without evidence. I suspect that the continuing popularity of connecting the dots arguments is partly anchored in the hope that confidence will out.
Solving for pattern, on the other hand, starts with accepting that you don’t, and can’t, know everything. While there won’t be a specific picture hiding in the data, there will be fragments and familiar elements that can be discerned, however incompletely. Your job is not to match what you see against a standard, it is to construct a plausible story and make sense out of what you think you are seeing. There is no passive role to adopt.