What’s weak about weak signals?

“What are your weak signals?”

This has been a go-to exercise in my leadership training sessions. After talking about Deepwater Horizon, and other cautionary tales, about signals that didn’t have a place to go, to land. Frustrations, observations, situations that didn’t fit. 

Every workplace has these moments. There is friction, uncertainty, workarounds. Compromises people make quietly to get the job done. Until something goes wrong, these are normally considered operational concerns if anything. Afterwards, with the benefit of hindsight, they suddenly become obvious warning signs that someone could and should have paid attention to. 

So I ask leaders: What are your weak signals? The discussion is always rich as leaders start to reflect on their own operations. But lately, the phrase itself has started to bother me: What is actually weak about a weak signal?

Before answering that, there is perhaps a more fundamental question: what is a signal?

A signal is something that points to something. It’s information that points to a bigger meaning. A bigger pattern perhaps. A queue forming outside a machine potentially indicates that the flow isn’t working. A workaround is perhaps intelligence that the setup doesn’t quite really fit. And someone sighing before starting a task could be a sign that the task is more difficult than it appears. The point here is not the behaviour itself, but what it points towards. 

So what makes a signal weak? Is it because it’s small or rare? That it’s easily drowned out by noise? Or, more interestingly, is it because we haven’t learned to listen to it? 

Consider this: A new production worker was assigned to the assembly line at a Toyota manufacturing plant. To install one component behind the instrument panel, she had to stand on her tiptoes and stretch. A taller worker could perform the same task comfortably, but for her it required reaching and straining. The team leader noticed, and immediately thought: This isn’t good. We need to fix this”. So they did. 

I've visited many workplaces. I can't think of one where someone standing on their tiptoes would even register as a signal, let alone trigger an improvement. At Toyota, it did. Because they had attuned their attention to when people compensate for system limitations. 

That attention isn’t as simple as a choice. Toyota's ability to see that signal reflects decades of cultural development, a specific philosophy about the relationship between workers and systems, and an environment where noticing and naming problems is expected and safe. Attention without those conditions is harder to sustain than the story may suggest. 

When my wife and I were expecting our first child, we needed to buy a pram. Suddenly, I noticed them everywhere. Every shopping centre, every café, every park seemed full of them. Of course, nothing had changed. But me. Prams had become meaningful to me. 

Our attention works like that: We notice what we care about. We don’t notice everything. We can’t. 

Organisations work the same way. Attention is shaped by what people have learned to find meaningful. When people begin talking about where work feels fragile, where friction is showing up, what people have to tolerate or compensate for, those conversations shape attention. People begin seeing things they previously walked past. The signal moves from being something one person notices to something the organisation recognises.

Prams became a salient signal to me because I had a genuine stake in them. For organisational signals to travel, people need more than the capacity to notice. They also need to believe that what they notice will be received, that surfacing a signal won't create work for them alone, invite scrutiny, or be quietly set aside. In many organisations, the rational response to noticing something uncomfortable is to say nothing. Attention without response trains people out of noticing. 

There's another layer worth naming here. Some signals are noticed but can't be shared, because we don't yet have the language to make the signal communicable. We might feel unease, sense something is off but can't name it precisely enough to say it out loud in a meeting. Organisations need not just attention but vocabulary, a shared language for the things that don't yet have names. 

So, what is actually weak?

Sometimes, genuinely, the signal itself. Some signals are subtle, ambiguous, or so mixed with noise that they're hard to detect regardless of how well-tuned the attention system is. Not every missed signal is a failure of attention.

But many of the signals we dismiss as weak are only weak in a specific sense: they exist in someone's experience but have no reliable channel to travel through. The person notices. They don't speak. Or they speak and nothing happens. Or the language isn't available to make the noticing shareable. As such, “weak signal” is often a misdiagnosis. It suggests a problem of detection when the problem is usually interpretation, legitimacy, or response. 

Which means the question worth asking isn't only "what are your weak signals?" but ‘what would need to be true for the signals that already exist to actually go somewhere?’

That's a harder question. And probably a more useful one.

Daniel