The Butterfly Effect of Weak Signals
One of the most interesting ideas that crossed my mind while attending the Forum on Leadership in Istanbul last week is the importance of detecting and interpreting weak signals for a business to survive. Not all weak signals are important. I dare to say that business signals follow a long-tail distribution in that 20% of them have 80% importance of affecting the longevity and survivability of businesses. Here is the dilemma- how to sort out the needles of the impacting small signals from the haystack of minor signals that are irrelevant. This is an urgent issue in modern business for an ignored impacting signal may bring a very successful business on its feet.
The Kodak company ignored the weak signal that should have alerted Kodak to read the future course rather than ignoring it to lose its business. Businesses need to adapt, and they need to do that beforehand. Waiting for things to change before adapting means leaving it too late. Big signals are, ironically, less important than weak signals because almost every business can see big signals. It is the weak signals that have the potential to grow rapidly and destroy the normal businesses that are worth. Because we see them small today, we tend to ignore them. This is paradoxical because planners plan and in our complex world it is the weak signals of change that may decide the future of business. Unfortunately, and paradoxically, these are the important signals that are ignored by business planners and strategists.
Plants and animals survive because they can detect the weak signals and adapt to them. They have this innate monitoring tools to help them do so. However; humans may blind themselves with established successes, familiarity, previous records, best practices and groupthink to lead themselves astray.
We need to be aware to get rid of our success syndromes and seeing success without its opposite failure or see the positive side and not balancing it by searching for the negative side of what we are successful at.
Ali Anani
The Cynefin Framework has four blocks to sort out organizations. These are simple, complicated, complex and chaotic. I may say that there are strong signals that organizations are growing more to being composed of complex and complicated. Complicated like the aerospace industry have thousand of different parts working together. Complex because these organizations have thousands of similar entities working together like thousands of workers. These mega-organizations are subject far more to weak signals than simple organizations. These are the organizations that need to consider weak signals as a major source of threat than falling prey to long-standing successes, assumptions, beliefs and groupthink.
The Blue Ocean Strategy calls for differentiating your business so that it may play alone in the clear waters of the blue ocean. I believe that the strongest differentiator and disruption to businesses is through identifying weak signals and studying them by developing different scenarios to prepare for the unpredictable business environment.
This buzz is an invitation for all readers to share their experiences and thoughts hoping for reaching a road map on how best to detect and understand weak signals in order to turn them into opportunities rather than threat"
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التعليقات
Ali Anani
منذ 5 سنوات #60
i agree. Currently, what I am studying is how to collect signals and how to sort them out. I shall be sharing my findings soon. I didn't realize the huge amount of thinking this issue requires, but it is most interesting.
Harvey Lloyd
منذ 5 سنوات #59
You know......we could probably express the thoughts here in Paretos distribution, by stating that 20% of the signals, both weak and strong represent 80% of success. Maybe by encouraging your readers to express the one key signal that lead them to success would allow you to distribute the 20% in a post. It would be interesting to hear the macro list but also how you might prioritize the same. Maybe a collective input and data prioritization of the signals we should listen.
Ali Anani
منذ 5 سنوات #58
I share your hope dear Tausif Mundrawala. Thank you for your attention
Ali Anani
منذ 5 سنوات #57
Thank you so much for expanding on the scope of signal sources and you are right. Whenever we have large numbers of signals. the Law of Large Number becomes dominant. We need to collect signals and as a first step to sort out the most promising 20% among the, I shall check the book you kindly recommended
Joel Anderson
منذ 5 سنوات #56
Ali Anani
منذ 5 سنوات #55
Thank you dear Tausif Mundrawala for accepting my invitation. I am happy for you to study design thinking. Staying closer to the customer is a bright idea. This is what we are practicing here- the contributors of comments are in reality a focus group. Yes, I wish we could meet eventually face-to-face
Ali Anani
منذ 5 سنوات #54
I totally agree with your comment. To explain weak signals require initially the presence of very few mice. They replicate fast. SO, the signal here is what would happen if these mice multiply? One answer is that we shall be seeing only 20% of them and that 89% are unseen. We then need to act faster.
Ali Anani
منذ 5 سنوات #53
Harvey Lloyd- I feel the same because of your comments and other contributors' comments as exactly outlined by your last two lines. Yes, one way of detecting signals is asking. What would happen? We need to develop different scenarios before we may consider a signal as noise or a pre-early indicator. I had to search for the meaning of quatrain. Gogoling this term and looking under images I ran across some strange thoughts. These thoughts are still weak signals, but I am sure some of them will develop into a buzz.
Harvey Lloyd
منذ 5 سنوات #52
I believe your rat/mice storyline here implies the opposite of how typically see the Pareto distribution. If i see mice, i can understand i only see 20%, 80% are unseen. A mouse problem can be become a building problem very quickly. This is another one of my gatekeeper rules. I can only see 20% of what is really going on, that may mean i am OK, but we usually fail because we didnt extend our look into the 80% far enough to understand the 20% was not a good sample.
Harvey Lloyd
منذ 5 سنوات #51
Early in my small business start up it was called market analysis. Now this has been broken down into some very quatrain physical componants. But in my early career I realized that there are literally millions of nuances within leadership and small business. I remember being overwhelmed. A gentlemen who had been where i was expressed that you need gatekeepers. I dont need to know every inch of fence that contains my thoughts, i merely need gates established at key junctions. My comment of Why should the customer buy from you, is one of those gate keepers. When i ask the question i venture down the fence line in both directions because i started at that gate. Your thoughts here of weak signals are picked up when we explore the question posed. We chisel back through data, meetings and customer interactions to see if we missed a whisper signal. Within your posts we cover many topics and healthy ones too. But it can be overwhelming when we look at all the levers and buttons we should be conscious within.
Ali Anani
منذ 5 سنوات #50
Ali Anani
منذ 5 سنوات #49
Harvey Lloyd- one recent example that crossed my mind is what happened in an Indian village. Mighty rats bring down 3-story Agra building https://bit.ly/2Npe8zN The rats burrowed underground and destroyed foundations and sewage pipes.Upon reaching the tipping point the building collapses within moments. If interested, the link has a video to show what happened. The point I want to make from this story is that the presence of a single mouse might be a weak signal to what would happen after sometime. When the number of mice increases then it becomes an early indicator. I hope that we don't bury relevant weak signals under the demolishing building of false assumptions. These are the mice that bring down our future.
Ali Anani
منذ 5 سنوات #48
Thank you Harvey Lloyd. I am researching the topic and there are strong affirmations of your point of view. This coincides with mine as well. One citation defines small signals as "term “weak signals” implies they are very vague at first and difficult to detect and become stronger and clearer with time (Nikander & Eloranta, 1997)". The more I am diving into this venture, the more support I find for the part of your comment addressed to me. Thank you for accepting my invitation to comment on this particular issue.
Harvey Lloyd
منذ 5 سنوات #47
I believe that CityVP \ud83d\udc1d Manjit describes some of the macro things that went on with technology in its early years. I would point out though that both Microsoft and Apple competed in a single space "user interface". From the mouse to showing executable files in GUI style, to Apple carrying it into apps. We could float upon technology. But our markets are rearranging themselves into community styled businesses where small shops are setting up. They addressing some of these weak signal issues. IMHO we are in our second generation of this and some of the skills of understanding weak signals is becoming more and more important. The smaller community based businesses tend to be one trick ponies, lacking the breadth of diversity into their systems. Ali \ud83d\udc1d Anani, Brand Ambassador @beBee I also believe that in leadership and management trends the weak signal concept is applicable. I would not want to corner it with macro business topics. The evolution of the human is showing up in the leadership realm and is sending signals. Getting ahead of these signals weak/strong is paramount in maintaining good corporate culture. American Indians described this as "feeling the wind". Alternatively the weak signal is trapped by a human with a world view, speaking differently. So we cant pin down interpretation except with in our own paradigm. Surely we can learn some concepts of listening, but it will be our shadow selves in the end that interpret the signal. Continuing the Pareto distribution concept within the chaos we call life.
Ali Anani
منذ 5 سنوات #46
Ali Anani
منذ 5 سنوات #45
Ali Anani
منذ 5 سنوات #44
Ali Anani
منذ 5 سنوات #43
Thank you so much for your elaboration dear CityVP \ud83d\udc1d Manjit. I enjoyed your examples. I believe that weak signals should lead to the formulation of early indicators. Being weak signals we tend to treat all of them as noise. As I mentioned in the buzz weak signals follow the Pareto Law in that 20% of them may have 80% of the impact. So, we need to separate first the white wheat (signals) from the dark wheat (signals).
Ali Anani
منذ 5 سنوات #42
The poetry of nature this is how I view your poetic comment my dear Lisa Vanderburg. Enjoy the fly and trip to nature
CityVP Manjit
منذ 5 سنوات #41
Your question is interesting which was How do you compare early indicators versus weak signals? In the case of Steve Jobs his weak signals came from the market place, he observed the relationship between possibilities for the user and what was already simmering in the market. In the case of early indicators it is the raid other technologists made into the research being done by Xerox Alto Park Research Center that showed that Xerox itself missed early indicators that were being developed by the very research dollars that company had invested in. In the end the early indicators were simply purchased and these acquisitions and purchases served the original observations of weak signals. Microsoft did the exact same. They did not even have a product built when they sold IBM an operating system. IBM did not read the signals from the marketplace therefore priced the value of its offering in the hardware because as the popular signal of the time was "no one ever got fired for buying an IBM". OK maybe nobody ever got fired for buying an IBM, but IBM lost billions in a market that was an instrumental part of their own product offering, except they only saw the hardware and not a single indicator that software was important. Then in the world of code the story gets murky about who developed what and who stole what - but what we do know is that people like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were cognizant of both indicators and signals and successfully married the two. The people who actually invented the core of their products and services can now only dream and count the lost opportunity of what was in their hands, designed and thought out by them - but having no sense of the value proposition of either key indicators or weak signals. Tales of MS DOS : https://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/did-bill-gates-steal-the-heart-of-dos Tales of Xerox PARC : https://www.mac-history.net/computer-history/2012-03-22/apple-and-xerox-parc
Lisa Vanderburg
منذ 5 سنوات #40
Yes dear man - tomorrow I hope, as today I can fly with my grandson. As we all know, conversing with frogs, weaving with spiders, hearing the wisdom of trees - respectful ears to their bark and all that is magical is only possible when we are with small children. That domino effect will ruminate throughout their lives :)
Ali Anani
منذ 5 سنوات #39
What an encouraging soul you are Clau Valerio. Thank you. I wonder what is the meaning of your name Clau! It has to mean beauty of spirit, heart and mind as you truly are.
Ali Anani
منذ 5 سنوات #38
Creative and imaginative people are rare because they tend to break out of the familiar. Seeing weak signals as noise is a practice by most of us; they aren't necessarily so by the creative and imaginative people. They see the unfamiliar, probe it and sense it. They have brave hearts to accept the unfamiliar. You captured this reality elegantly and eloquently CityVP \ud83d\udc1d Manjit by writing "but a Steve Jobs character who can put life and success into weak signals is the road less traveled and one where the handful see the opportunity and have the power or reserve to exercise it". You bring to my mind another issue, which is early indicators versus weak signals. Weak signals may be considered as weak early indicators and therefore are dropped by most of us. How do you compare early indicators versus weak signals?
CityVP Manjit
منذ 5 سنوات #37
Ali Anani
منذ 5 سنوات #36
Oh dear @Paul Walters. Great to read a comment by you as I know you were cycling in Europe (Holland ) and traveling across Europe by train. Happy arrival on the platform of beBee
Ali Anani
منذ 5 سنوات #35
I am receiving the signal and you have an idea "stored" in your mind. You shall share it that I know you closely dear Lisa Vanderburg
Paul Walters
منذ 5 سنوات #34
Lisa Vanderburg
منذ 5 سنوات #33
How right you are my friend..on all counts!#28 Could be that those leaders are less concerned with the water coming in than the eventual loss of air Debasish Majumder!
Ali Anani
منذ 5 سنوات #32
Just your comment appeared here John Rylance. I have already responded to your comment.
Ali Anani
منذ 5 سنوات #31
Ali Anani
منذ 5 سنوات #30
John Rylance
منذ 5 سنوات #29
Debasish Majumder
منذ 5 سنوات #28
your are sheer an axiom of humility sir Ali \ud83d\udc1d Anani, Brand Ambassador @beBee! i only to emulate this trade only from you my dear sir.
Ali Anani
منذ 5 سنوات #27
I find you dear Debasish Majumder soaring besides me
Debasish Majumder
منذ 5 سنوات #26
Debasish Majumder
منذ 5 سنوات #25
you are perhaps the most exquisite manager who can exploits the best out of his amazing ability to get the desired yield effortlessly! i wonder, what has triggered you to engage in business front instead of academic arena sirAli \ud83d\udc1d Anani, Brand Ambassador @beBee, where you can have everything out of your exquisite talent! rather you can create more talent out of your amazing prodigy! i simply doff of to your grand interpretations sir!
Ali Anani
منذ 5 سنوات #24
My previous comment missed first point. It is related to receiving a small signal from you dear Debasish Majumder. Whenever you commented more than once on my previous buzzes you ended up writing a poem on the subject of the buzz. Are you writing a buzz on small signals my friend?
Ali Anani
منذ 5 سنوات #23
Debasish Majumder
منذ 5 سنوات #22
but when a vessel being launched how many of us do really care the displaced water and its volume sir Ali \ud83d\udc1d Anani, Brand Ambassador @beBee? but, more than the volume of water at any pretext may enter to the concern vessel, we may not perhaps the impending disaster how rapidly it will work! i wonder, how many of the leaders are aware about the incessant entering of water through a little hole and capable to ponder what disaster it may beckon?
Ali Anani
منذ 5 سنوات #21
I only hope that the ball is of crystal so I may be able to see through my crystal-like friend Lisa Vanderburg
Ali Anani
منذ 5 سنوات #20
My "synchronous friend" dearest Lisa Vanderburg. You very sensibly wrote "Seems to me one of the greatest dangers to our vessel is inattention to that tiny noise". You say you aren't in business, but you truly are. Why "synchronous" friend? This is because I read your comment having just watched this video titled "8 Signs You’re In A Fake Relationship". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bs-2yaOsnf8 This means that detecting and interpreting small signals are not limited to business, but extend to all aspects of our lives and including social lives. You know how you get signals from somebody writing a comment and both of us have experienced this.
Lisa Vanderburg
منذ 5 سنوات #19
Lisa Vanderburg
منذ 5 سنوات #18
Harvey Lloyd rightly said.
Ali Anani
منذ 5 سنوات #17
Ali Anani
منذ 5 سنوات #16
Thank you deeply for your outstanding comment and sharing of your work experience my good friend Jerry Fletcher. I wonder what happened to your analog (Tektronix) client!. This is equally interesting. Your example is a perfect one of a successful business that captures weak signals before competitors may notice them as they grow in importance. I am glad you referred to the 3-D printing because I believe we must have watchful eyes to trace developments in this field. As for Media Lab at MIT, luckily I am reading their publications. I quoted one of them in my comment No. 8. The Xerox case is a very interesting suggestion and I shall look at it "in the eye".
Jerry Fletcher
منذ 5 سنوات #15
Ali Anani
منذ 5 سنوات #14
@Bill King- this is a great observation and very relevant story of observation and its impact. namita sinha wrote two great comments on the shared buzz on LinkedIn. In her second comment she wrote "I believe all Business owners and Entrepreneurs in order to detect the weakest signals ,must first practice "enlightened leadership," which essentially means being a good observer and listener - understanding the emotions of human beings, triggers in their business...". Your comment just gives observation the value it merits. It is amazing how we may observe from data analysis. Analysis isn't enough if not coupled by observant eyes.
Ali Anani
منذ 5 سنوات #13
Great explanations my friend. You do open up this topic and enhance our vision. Reading history will give great support to your comment. One example is Copernicus who said that the earth revolves and he was about to be buried alive. When people fail to "We add to that distortion. If something doesn't fit what we previously believed, then we create a rationale for distorting its meaning to fit our beliefs" people punish the right man. When the Noble Prize laureate Staudinger developed from what started as weak signals the presence of macro-molecules (polymers) a prominent scientist at the time called him crazy. Even scientists may fall in this trap because they see deviations of linearity as stupid. Imagine if the theory of polymers was discarded what effect this would have on humanity!
Ali Anani
منذ 5 سنوات #12
Absolutely dear friend Edward Lewellen. Your thoughts are wonderful. We may lose the path ahead because of blindness or from having too much bright light blurring our vision. Generalization is a form of falling to the familiar and this drifts us away from creative thinking and using our senses sensibly.
Ali Anani
منذ 5 سنوات #11
Thank you Harvey Lloyd for your weak signals are truly differentiates you as a commenter. I am on a journey to explore in more depth all issues pertinent to weak signals. These are the promising signals for a successful and strong futures. The paradox is we get stronger from the weaker signals. This is the anti-arrogance attitude in rreality.
Harvey Lloyd
منذ 5 سنوات #10
When we look at medicine we see great weak signals and the courage to chase them. A big weak signal was when medicine determined that men and women have unique biology. Reproductively, certainly but in many other areas as it applies to treatment. Before these signals were seen and understood we saw all matter as matter. If you would allow me drift a little political here, society is expressing that there are no differences. This is a weak signal or sorts that is of the type we should listen to, but walk with caution. We dont want medicine impacted by this thinking. I love how you have displayed the signals of potential chaos in our lives. We need not worry but we should investigate. We slough these weak signals off at our own peril.
Ali Anani
منذ 5 سنوات #9
There are many main thoughts in your comment. The one that grabbed my attention forcefully is "Weak signals is chaos letting us know that change is ahead". This is a spectacular thought. You know that recently a drug company offered a known drug for epilepsy in a 3- D format.. This is a breakthrough. The drug dissolves readily in the mouth. This is a signal that is worthy of monitoring because it could initiate a new trend of making designated drugs for individuals. It may spur efforts to produce 3- D forms of many more tablet drugs. A new shift is emerging. How this shall affect cost of drugs, their differentiation and disruption of conventional pharmaceutical industries are questions to monitor. This development could disrupt a large sector of the pharmaceutical industries and related industries. The emergence of 3- D printing as a whole is also worthy of witnessing- hopefully, with minimum arrogance resulting from previous successes.
Ali Anani
منذ 5 سنوات #8
There are many references in literature that support your thoughts Harvey Lloyd is consistent with your thoughts here. Hopefully, we here the right echo and not the misleading ones.
Harvey Lloyd
منذ 5 سنوات #7
Ali Anani
منذ 5 سنوات #6
Dear friend Edward Lewellen- I would to share this information with you from MIT study that is supportive of your comment. "9. Trust seasoned intuition. Experienced managers often possess far more knowledge than they realize, especially when operating within their domains of expertise. If so, they should learn when and how to trust their hunches. Scientist Gary Klein has studied the power of intuition in fast-moving environments such as firefighting, medical emergencies and military combat.26 In one study he found that experienced nurses picked up the onset of septic shock in premature infants at least a day before the textbook symptoms appeared and a blood test could confirm the presence of the deadly bacterium. These nurses had learned to be sensitive to weak signals even if the cues varied and the symptoms were not strong. It takes many years of experience, with good feedback, to develop reliable intuition. But once it has been honed, intuitive hunches should be viewed as valuable inputs, along with more analytical ones, for the judgment process". file:///C:/Users/ali_a/Downloads/How_to_Make_Sense_of_Weak_Signals.pdf
Harvey Lloyd
منذ 5 سنوات #5
Ali Anani
منذ 5 سنوات #4
You are right dear Debasish Majumder. Failing to spot the weak signal that a replacement technology is coming results from many factors. These include, among others, falling to the mirage of best practices for complex companies, drunkenness by previous successes (the syndrome of success, groupthink, unwillingness to change, taking the path of least resistance and a host of other factors. The resulting rigidity failed the company. So, this is a complex issue and results from the interactions of many parameters. So, I am in agreement with your comment. I wish to thank you for sharing the buzz my friend.
Debasish Majumder
منذ 5 سنوات #3
Ali Anani
منذ 5 سنوات #2
What we consider as noise could be the weak signal that we seek for my friend.
Ali Anani
منذ 5 سنوات #1
Dear friend- you started your comment by saying "Fear friend". My guts tell me that you were thinking of people being fearful of their guts and intuition. I agree 100% with you. I might reveal that I am doing a big literature search on weak signals and how to detect them, sort them and act accordingly. In most of my research findings authors refer to intuition as a compass to what is probably revealing in the future. So, you call is sound and is supported by all big thinkers. I greatly appreciate your feedback