There’s no sense in denying it: interpreting weak signals into useful decision making takes time and focus. These three stages can help you see the periphery—and act on it—much more clearly.
Managers will never be able to predict the future as clearly as The Amazing Kreskin. But by making a
deliberate effort, they can develop the clairvoyance they–and those around them–already possess into a potent competitive weapon. Because their antennae are always aloft, executives naturally detect weak signals as they drift in and out of range from the outer edges of their marketplace. How they find, keep and make sense of those faint clues can make all the difference when it comes to getting an early start on confronting a threat or exploiting an opportunity.
In this article, the authors draw from their research into companies that learn from the future. They outline the specific skills managers need to develop–and those they had better lose–to correct their fuzzy vision of what’s ahead. First, the authors identify the different breeds of biases that most managers don’t even realize they have, and provide them with the tools to rout out such distortions. Then they outline nine proven and practical strategies managers can use to find, understand and make use of the most meaningful distant data.
Confronting reality isn’t as straightforward as hushing hunches in favor of high-minded analysis; there has to be room for both. Finally, the authors encourage executives to consider new information within the context of as many wider views of the future marketplace as they can find–tapping the farsighted folks at their company and in their industry. By learning how to extract meaning, managers will grow to understand that the future is plainly ours to see, no matter what the song says. What takes work is piecing those glimpses into a plausible panorama so that managers can see where their company strategy fits–before anyone else does.
2 Comments On: How to Make Sense of Weak Signals
Director Schoemaker, thank you for this insightful and thought provoking article. Throughout years of employment experience, after being laid off, I learned to pay attention to warning signals, or “yellow flags.” For example, the project you’re on is getting less funding in the next year. Do you ignore it and put blinders on? Or start tuning up your resume? The correct answer is tune up the resume.
So, in a crude way, I developed this awareness and it helped me escape situations that were destined for failure. Certainly not foolproof, but the percentage over time is positive. So,your article resonates and is even stimulating in terms of research ideas, etc.
It would be an intereting hypothesis to test, but often I feel that groupthink doesn’t emerge out of the vapor, rather, there is a source, a leader, a tiny power group who starts the ball rolling. Of course, subordinates eager to please, “yes” their way through the day and one can see over time, if the organization is good, arrogance, blind faith and all the rest create the environment for groupthink. Even at the micro level, because I tend to be independent, I’ve seen others follow the low level leader for fear that they might draw their wrath with an honest disagreement and it’s not long before everyone is just nodding their heads. Some of the “enemies” (few) I’ve created by disagreeing with their infallibility is humorous. Point being, I’d like to see more about how “the leader” impacts “groupthink.”
Thank you for reading, Mark Ramos, engineer, MBA student, University of Phoenix
I did my PhD dissertation on theories of strategic surprise in the US intelligence community. I found that one can make the case that more effort should be put into examining ones assumptions and guiding hypotheses than into looking for weak signals. The signals you detect, after all, are a function of those assumptions and hypotheses. Theories of strategic surprise make the point again and again that after a surprise the signals that might have forewarned people existed, but no one was watching for them.
For more on this critique, see Philippe Silberzahn’s piece “Competitive intelligence and strategic surprises: Why monitoring weak signals is not the right approach” at http://bit.ly/yl9KmA
For a technique for sorting through hypotheses, see “Business and Intelligence Techniques: the Role of Competing Hypotheses” at: http://bit.ly/w3mvbl