Abstract
The treatment of weak signals is identified as a method to identify strategic surprises in a firm’s environment. Many researchers address the problem of anticipation of movements that have an impact on a firm’s environment. Weak signals are considered in some approaches and presented in the literature, but also other methods are explored. This article tries to deepen the discussion of how to treat and interpret weak signals collected in a firm’s environment. The concept of a weak signal is explained and the discussion about how to collect and interpret them is presented. Two important aspects are distinguished in the article: the usefulness of information technology in collection and treatment of weak signals and the concept of collective sensemaking in interpreting weak signals. Two cases of weak signal interpretation are presented as illustrations
Highlights
There is an ongoing lack of understanding of the notion of weak signals and few methods exist to explore them
The discussion of weak signals in a collective way is in line with the idea that in a competitive intelligence process, it is not effective to deliver reports and answers to managers as they tend to ignore them or to consider them threatening to their position (Soilen, 2017)
The point was to identify disruptions and strategic surprises, not tendencies projected from past data
Summary
There is an ongoing lack of understanding of the notion of weak signals and few methods exist to explore them. Many organizations considerer the environment as analyzable and that it has the information needed to obtain correct answers to their questions It is just a matter of searching for this information through “discovery”, one of the four scanning methods that may be assumed by an organization in an environmental scanning process (Daft and Weick, 1984). Weak signals through an inductive process stimulate the hypothesis generation and sensemaking of the competitive environment. It is not a matter of finding the right answer, as in a discovery scanning processes, but creating perspectives and possibilities that outline how the future environment and competitive may move (Gilad, 2011). Weak signals are considered here to be an inductor of collective sensemaking about what may or may not come in a future environment
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