Use when your team keeps hitting a result that contradicts the plan but everyone rationalizes it away — name it an anomaly and track it instead of dismissing it. Use to predict which 'small inconsistencies' in a company, a relationship, or a belief will eventually break it: the ones that recur and can't be made to fit.

Kuhn's anomaly is the failure of an expected outcome, not a refutation: 'anomalies, or violations of expectation.' The key dynamic is that the framework protects itself first — 'normal science often suppresses fundamental novelties because they are necessarily subversive of its basic commitments.' But because no framework is perfectly arbitrary, the suppression can't hold forever.