How to detect a weak signal and turn it into a strength for your company!
How important are weak signals? They may seem difficult to identify, but they can become real assets for companies and organisations that seek to detect them and extract value from them.
Whether you are at the head of a company, or in charge of a business unit within a company, weak signals may already be at the heart of your concerns. This information can be used to predict trends in your market and changes in your sector of activity.
Identifying them and making them your own is therefore essential for making decisions, devising a strategy and, above all, knowing how to react and when.
But how do you go about recognising a weak signal ? And how do you analyse them so that you can use them in the context of your business? Here are some ideas you can follow!
Weak signals: what are they?
The concept of weak signals was first introduced in 1975 by Igor Ansoff, a leading specialist in management and corporate strategy.
A forerunner in this field, Ansoff put forward the idea that information, especially when it is strategic, is an essential pillar in a company's development. He attaches the utmost importance to the collection and processing of business information , which is essential to the survival of any organisation.
According to Igor Ansoff, a weak signal is early information of low intensity that heralds a trend, a threat or an opportunity. If these precursors are detected in time and interpreted correctly, they can be used to anticipate and react to important trends or events .
A weak signal is therefore fragmentary information that is rapidly obsolete and largely anticipatory, enabling the company that identifies it to predict future major changes in its economic environment.
Igor Ansoff , Managing Strategic Surprise by Response to Weak Signal (1975)
What is the value of weak signals for companies?
Weak signals enable companies to anticipate changes that are likely to have a major impact on their business. They enable companies to :
- anticipate changes in its environment,
- enrich its strategic thinking and facilitate decision-making,
- respond appropriately to these events.
Weak signals are useful for predictive analysis. Detecting and interpreting them can help to :
- detect opportunities ;
- anticipate potential threats
- monitor competitive trends;
- boost a company's capacity for innovation;
- decipher consumer behaviour, etc.
💡 The whole point of these factors is that they trigger action on the part of the company. Bringing them to light in a very specific context will reveal their full relevance and enable the right decisions to be made.
How do you detect weak signals?
1 - Encourage feedback
Without setting up a project as such, with objectives and resources allocated for its implementation, you can already involve your employees as sources of knowledge.
Within your company, department or business unit, your employees come from a variety of areas of expertise: finance, sales, marketing, legal, etc. Each of these people is a potential source of knowledge. Each of these people is potentially the bearer of a vision of the market or of a particular sector of activity .
The aim is to find ways of encouraging everyone to share their knowledge and discoveries, which can become meaningful signals.
Start by making them aware of the importance of the vision they have built up of the company's environment, and invite them to pass on any findings they come across in the course of their work.
To make the most of this collective intelligence, make it easier for information to flow. Set up systems for gathering and sharing information, whether this involves :
- regular meetings between people with different profiles
- discussion threads or feeds on an intranet or corporate social network,
- or dedicated knowledge management tools.
Detecting weak signals is becoming a shared ambition, and can be systematised by evolving into a cross-functional project. It's up to you to break down the barriers between departments to make the most of collective intelligence.
2 - Understanding their complexity
Weak signals are sometimes scattered, equivocal and difficult to identify. Indeed, looking for a weak signal can be tricky, because we don't always know exactly what we' re looking for.
The complexity that characterises weak signals is due in particular to :
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- their degree of uncertainty
- their fragmented or incomplete nature
- the difficulty of exploiting them.
This presents a number of challenges:
- succeeding in capturing the relevant elements in the abundance of data ;
- finding the right people to analyse them
- being responsive, because information quickly becomes obsolete.
So it's easy to understand why some companies are reluctant to invest in researching weak signals, when strong signals are often more accessible and simpler to analyse.
And yet it is because they are so weak that they are so valuable : they allow you to anticipate future trends and gain an edge in your market.
3 - Set up a monitoring activity
As well as making your staff aware of the need to share information, you can systematise this process and embed it in your company's practices.
Strategic intelligence is a way for a company to listen to its environment in order to understand and anticipate changes. Its role is to monitor emerging trends in order to open up new opportunities and feed into the company's overall strategy .
Here are some ways of organising it:
- identify your objectives by defining the expected results of this activity ;
- select all relevant sources of information ;
- Vary your approaches and combine different skills to process the information;
- capitalise on knowledge, as several elements combined or cross-referenced together will be able to shed interesting light.
💡 You can also actively monitor your market by keeping an eye on social media, which can reveal many interesting signals. A social network management tool could prove invaluable in this respect.
4 - Equip yourself with the right tools
To go further, using a specialised tool will help you to scan the web intelligently, looking for weak signals.
There are various types of tool to help you both in your search for information and in using it.
In particular, you can rely on :
- a marketing intelligence tool,
- data analysis or Business Intelligence (BI) software,
- an economic intelligence platform.
Even more than detecting them, it is the interpretation of the signals that will be decisive.
With a BI solution , you can turn large volumes of data into usable reports and indicators. This type of tool enables you to read and detect information that is sometimes hidden and to facilitate its analysis.
The combination of tools and expert analysis can help you extract strategic meaning from the information you collect. You can call on market intelligence expertise to ensure that you collect, process and analyse information effectively, without running the risk of letting it become outdated.
You can also choose a complete market intelligence solution, such as Geotrend, which uses all the information relevant to you in the form of a map , giving you an overview of your ecosystem at a glance.
Thanks to a rapid , visual understanding of your environment, you can detect the signals that need your attention more effectively. As both an aid to forecasting and an aid to decision-making, the tool enables you to be agile and responsive.
Weak signals: a marketing example
A biscuit brand, for example, wants to anticipate its competitors' strategies, such as :
- their innovations,
- product launches
- communication campaigns, etc.
Its marketing teams will try to identify weak signals based on information about their competitors. In particular, they may :
- monitor forums for consumers and enthusiasts of these types of products,
- carry out an in-depth audit of their competitors' corporate sites,
- analyse their campaigns in real time, etc.
By detecting a change or any early signs of a trend, they can :
- build and adjust their marketing strategy
- manage it more responsively
- and refine their marketing actions in real time.
From insight to informed business management
Once interpreted, weak signals are invaluable data for guiding your business in a constantly changing environment, to improve its resilience and agility.
By putting each signal into context, you can turn it into a valuable insight, and stay one step ahead of your market.
Far from being prophetic, all weak signals retain an element of uncertainty. But perhaps it's more risky not to take any risks at all. A weak signal could be the trigger that helps you to dare to break new ground rather than follow suit.
Cultivate your culture of innovation and get ready to take the turn taken by your market in good time... if not before!
How do you approach weak signals? Do you have a method for detecting them?
Article translated from French