About six months ago, I came up with the following mental image:

Go out and try a bunch of things.  Write up your successes as stories, with date, participants, and plot.

Line several (at least three!) people's success stories up against the wall, and extract their commonness.  Write up this commonness as patterns.

More recently, the mental image transformed into the concept that pattern creation is a two-step process.  The creation of successes is the first step, and the extraction of their commonness is the second step.  Using this concept, patterns are both the commonness of the successes, and the write-up of this commonness.

In architecture, I think of the successes as the buildings that have QWAN.  In code, I think of the successes as those pieces of code that are elegant.  It is trickier with actions, processes and methodologies; a particular action often does not leave a physical success.  So with actions and processes, I think of the successes as the written success stories of what happened.

A friend who went to journalism school explained that a journalist reports about who, what, when, where, and how.  In other words, stories.

I don't think this concept will be useful for everyone, but it has helped me. -- StanSilver

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Good synopsis, Stan. -- AlistairCockburn

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Interesting. Here's a thought experiment: Go out and try a bunch of things. Write down all you did in some malleable medium, such as a Wiki. RefactorMercilessly until you have achieved OnceAndOnlyOnce. Question: Would some of the things you were left with automatically be the patterns and AntiPattern''''''s embedded in your stories? What else would you be left with? -- FalkBruegmann
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CategorySuccess