The secret weapon for seeing the future: weak signals (part 1)
What is a weak signal?
Megatrends and trends are things that are usually familiar to people interested in the future, but weak signals are more specific and unknown tool to anticipate the future.
Weak signals are vague information about tomorrow and they can foretell us about the future trends, even megatrends — or then not.
In practice they are something strange, new, amazing, crazy things that exist today. They are new innovations, first things that something happens, changes in people’s behavior etc. For organizations, these kind of weak signals are important to collect and analyze as they might give companies hints for example of future consumer’s needs (more about this in the next posts about weak signals).
As a futurist, I am a weak signal hunter, because it gives me more possibilities to anticipate the future. I have also been interested academically in weak signals — my PhD thesis was about weak signals in organizational futures learning. I personally collect weak signals in many ways. One of the way is to post them to my Instagram channel @futureweaksignals
But how to identify a weak signal? I have made a light “weak signal test”, that anyone can identify if the signal is weak or strong.
Tell about the weak signal to your colleague, and look at her/his reactions. If…
- it makes your colleagues to laugh
2. your collagues are opposing it: no way, it will never happen
3. it makes people to wonder
4. no one has heard about it before
5. it is wanted that no-one talks about it anymore (a taboo)
If you get “yes” to any of these points: congratulations, you have found a weak signal!
This is a series of writings explaining the idea behind weak signals. The series contains following posts:
Post 1 (this post): What is a weak signal?
Post 2 : What to do with weak signals?
Post 3 : Where to find weak signals?
Post 4 : How could organizations use and crowdsource weak signals?
Are you interested about my ideas? If so, you could book my webinar lectures and key-note speeches via speakers office Cool’n’Talk.
