In some cases, I fail to see that a problem could be solved by the divide and conquer method. To give a specific example, when studying the find max sub-array problem, my first approach is to brute force it by using a double loop to find the max subarray. When I saw the solution using the divide and conquer approach which is recursion-based, I understood it but ok. From my side, though, when I first read the problem statement, I did not think that recursion is applicable.

When studying a problem, is there any technique or trick to see that a recursion based (i.e. divide and conquer) approach can be used or not?