The secret weapon for seeing the future: weak signals (part 4)
How could organizations use and crowdsource weak signals?
I believe, that weak signals should be collected in all levels of the organizations, analyzed and used in strategy work. Unlike in some cases when futures work is considered only to be work of the upper management, I believe that everybody in the organization should be involved in looking at the future weak signals and collecting them. Why? Because the whole organization has more eyes than only the upper management level. This resource should be used in futures spotting.
I have worked in an organization that was a pioneer in crowdsourcing the future by utilizing weak signals. The organization was called Finpro, which focused on promoting Finnish trade. Customers of Finpro were Finnish SMEs that aimed for international trade. That specific organization is not existing anymore, but it is part of another organization, Business Finland. In this post I will tell, how we crowdsourced the future at Finpro. You can also find an academic article of this process, written by me.
At Finpro every employee was asked to spot weak signals as a part of her/his work. Actually, every employee had a target of spotting 2 weak signals a month. This is an amount, that everybody can survive. Of course the more weak signals an employee spotted, the better. As the employee spotted the signal, she/he inserted it to an intranet tool that was used in the organization. The tool was called Trendwiki, and it is a tool provided by Data Rangers. For getting people involved in the process, the foresight team (that I was a member of) had trainings for employees how to use the tool. The foresight team’s task was to go through all the signals and combine them to emerging trends. We published a trend list twice a year, and our customers could use these trends for their own foresight purposes.
In the next picture there is a process of using weak signals in organization’s future work. At Finpro we only focused on the steps 1 and 2.
As organizations have collected and analyzed weak signals to possible trends, the foresight process could continue by creating various scenarios based on the trends (step 3.). Scenarios are alternative futures. They are not predictions, but more visions what could happen in the future if some trends get stronger or weaker. These scenarios can be then used for testing the future-proofness of the strategy and refining the strategy (step 4.)
Even though spotting weak signals is the task of the whole organization, there should be a dedicated foresight team to be responsible of the process. In the end of the day, the collected and analyzed weak signals information should be used also by the board of the company in the strategy work. In the following picture you can see the division of the task on the organization’s foresight work.
This is a series of writings explaining the idea behind weak signals. The series contains following posts:
Post 1 : 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.
