I Don’t Look for Bad People. I Look for Patterns.
Most people want to know if someone is good or bad. But that’s the wrong question to ask yourself. People aren’t stable categories. They don’t stay fixed in one state. Their behavior shifts, context changes, pressure builds, and their behavioral decisions follow.
Risk doesn’t come from who someone is. It comes from what they start doing, and how that changes over time. We like to label because it simplifies things. We use, reliable, unstable, honest or problematic, and they may give us a sense of control. But labels do not help us predict behavior; patterns or changes in the patterns of their behavior are more significant.
In most environments, people rely on their instincts and gut feelings. We may read tone, posture, or someone’s confidence. We decide quickly who feels “off” and who doesn’t. Sometimes that works, or most of the time, it doesn’t. Because instinct is biased toward what’s visible, and behavior that leads to problems is rarely obvious in the beginning.
The individuals who cause the most disruption aren’t always the ones who stand out early. They’re often consistent, predictable, most of all, trusted. Until they are not. Behaviors do not shift all at once, they tend to drift.
Small, subtle changes in communication, withdrawal or a fixation on specific grievances. Changes in how someone interprets events, people, or decisions; none of these, on their own, trigger concern. Together, over time, they form the pattern. That’s what matters, not an isolated moment, not what label you have placed on them, the pattern.
Consistency establishes a baseline; deviation signals change, an escalation defines risk. Most people miss this because they are not tracking behavior over time. They’re reacting to moments. A single comment, single interaction, or impression.
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But behavior isn’t a snapshot, it is a sequence. And sequences tell a different story. The person who seems calm may be accumulating pressure. The person who appears disengaged may be shifting focus. The person who is always agreeable may be avoiding something entirely. None of that is visible if you’re only looking for obvious problems.
This is where most systems fail. They are designed to detect disruption, not progression. They look for what has already happened, not what is forming. They rely on reports, incidents, and clear indicators; things that are easy to document. But by the time behavior is obvious, the escalation or risk is already on the table.
The goal isn’t to identify “bad people.” That’s not a reliable method, and it never has been. The goal is to recognize when their behavior stops being consistent or when it begins to drift. When patterns start to form that weren’t there before. That requires attention. Not to personality, to the change in the pattern. Because risk isn’t the type of person, it’s their trajectory.
Think about someone you misjudged. Not the person who made it obvious, the one who surprised you. The one you didn’t see coming. Chances are the pattern was there; the drift was happening. The sequence was forming; you just weren’t tracking it because you were looking for a moment instead of a trajectory. That’s not a personal failure, that’s human failure. The question is whether we keep making it.
We build incident reports after the fact and call it a safety system. We document what already happened and call it prevention. We wait for behavior to become undeniable before we take it seriously, and then we ask why nobody saw it coming. Someone may have; they just didn’t know what they were looking at. Because nobody taught them to track sequences. Nobody told them that a pattern forming slowly is more dangerous than a moment arriving loudly.
If you take anything away from this, you are not looking for a bad person. You are looking for a change, a drift. A sequence that wasn’t there six weeks or a year ago. And when you find it, not a moment, not a label, not a gut feeling, but an actual traceable shift in behavior over time? That’s not paranoia, that’s the work, and the work, done early enough, is the only thing that may actually change an outcome.
About the Author
Kevin Schell is an intelligence analyst specializing in behavioral threat assessment, protective intelligence, and open-source investigation. His work focuses on identifying escalation trajectories, synthesizing fragmented indicators across organizational domains, and producing structured, defensible risk assessments under conditions of uncertainty.
