Amplifying Weak Signals

A few issues ago, we covered various kinds of retrospective – the practice of looking back and learning from work, as well as some of the conditions and requirements for effective retrospectives. One of those points was about the “weak signals” that we might surface in a retrospective practice. In this issue, we’re looking at those weak signals, what they are, how we identify them, and how to amplify them.

The Black Cat in the Matrix (Warner Bros.)

Remember the black cat in the Matrix? In this scene, it’s Neo’s first time entering the Matrix after his emancipation. He sees a black cat walk past, then another, seemingly identical one, and experiences deja vu. That cat was a weak signal. Neo didn’t interpret it as such, but, crucially, did notice it. Because novices (and, apparently, people with autism) tend to use explicit practice and observe more details than experts, who instead become adept at using heuristic shortcuts and pattern matching, novices may be more likely to spot anomalies, but importantly, may be less likely to interpret them. However, when Neo mentions his deja vu, and the cat, to Trinity and Morpheus, they immediately interpret it as a sign that the agents have changed something. Trinity and Morpheus have the experience and expertise to identify that Neo’s simple black cat observation indicates something far more significant. As Charles Perrow noted in a line in Normal Accidents that could have been lifted straight out of The Matrix, “seeing is not always believing; sometimes we must believe before we can see.”*

The black cat, like any weak signal:

• Was a subtle indicator. An easily missable anomaly, not overtly threatening, but suggesting that something is amiss.
• Was an indication of a larger issue. Weak signals can be early indicators of more complex and potentially dangerous issues.
• Had to be interpreted. A weak signal on its own doesn’t mean much. But when we combine it with past experience and expertise, along with other signals, we can understand its potential implications.
• Made sense in retrospect. Weak signals may be ambiguous, confusing, even contradictory, until seen in retrospect, where they (usually) make sense in the wider context of the outcome, particularly when combined with expert judgement and insight.
• Was a trigger for action. In the Matrix, the black cat prompts Morpheus and the others to take immediate action and escape through the walls. When we believe we’ve identified a weak signal, we should take action to prevent something more catastrophic from occurring. 

A weak signal may be seemingly unconnected to other information, a piece of data that makes little sense on its own. It might be an unexpected or unexplainable alarm or spike in data, or an observation by a colleague. Weak signals you may be familiar with in your day-to-day life include things like a small damp spot in an otherwise dry place in your house, a light that blows bulbs more often than others, or your car beginning to use a bit more fuel than it usually does. All of these may be nothing to worry about – maybe someone spilled a drink, you had a bad batch of bulbs, or you’ve been doing more short journeys recently. 

But they may be signals of something more sinister, such as a leaking roof, an arcing electrical connection, or an engine fault in your car. 

The Signal and the Noise

Nate Silver, in The Signal and The Noise, describes another weak signal that was, ultimately, dismissed – but not straight away. In April 2009, a series of small tremors were noticed in the town of L’Aquila, Italy. Small earthquakes are relatively common here, but this series of tremors were around a hundred times more frequent than usual. At the same time, Giampaolo Giuliani, a technician at Italy’s National Institute of Nuclear Physics, detected unusually high levels of radon, which might be a precursor to an earthquake. He warned the mayor, who ordered vans to drive around and warn residents of the threat, but when no earthquake occurred, Giuliani was reported to local authorities and punished for “procurato allarme” (bringing about alarm) and told to keep his concerns to himself. A 6.3 magnitude earthquake hit L’Aquila 7 days later, killing more than 300 people, leaving 65,000 homeless, and causing $16billion in damage. Don’t be too hasty to dismiss a weak signal.

We should be careful not to disregard warnings or concerns from “outsiders” or non-experts too. For example, prior to the Aberfan disaster in Wales in 1966, residents raised questions about the safety of the tip, but their concerns were dismissed because they were not considered credible. 

At work, in order to identify and proactively address issues before they cause real harm, we need to create the competencies and capabilities to identify weak signals in our teams and organisations, but it doesn’t end there. Importantly, we need to amplify those weak signals. As Lars Axelsson points out in Resilience Engineering, Concepts and Precepts, “…a problem that stays with whoever discovers it, is a problem that remains unknown”, and Amy Edmondson highlights in The Right Kind of Wrong: weak signals may be ignored (as in Aberfan example above), diluted as they traverse the hierarchy (as in the Challenger disaster) or downplayed (as in the 737 MAX), so we should amplify them to ensure that they can be heard and interpreted correctly. Gene Kim and Steve Spear also include the amplification of signals as a core mechanism for success in their new book “Wiring the winning organisation”. They describe “amplification” as a core vignette in organisational learning: amplification flags, earlier and more frequently, that problems exist which require people’s ingenuity to solve. And the continued existence of these signals makes it evident that these problems have potentially not been seen and successfully solved. 

Amplifying Weak Signals

Amplification involves boosting signals that may indicate that an issue exists, as opposed to suppressing them. This approach prevents problems from lingering or escalating into more significant problems or disasters. We can do this via:

• Increasing Awareness: Make sure that everyone is aware of what weak signals may be and are actively looking for them. Use examples of what weak signals may look like, and ensure that people know what mechanisms exist for highlighting them.
• Enhancing Feedback Loops: Create systems where information about weak signals is quickly disseminated and acted upon within the organisation. These systems could range from real-time practices such as the Andon Cord, to events including regular meetings to share and examine signals and look for patterns. 
• Generative Leadership: Leaders play a crucial role in amplifying weak signals by setting an example, praising and encouraging reporting, and ensuring that reported issues are taken seriously and addressed promptly and openly. Crucially, leaders should also ensure that people are not punished for reporting false alarms – instead we should use false alarms as learning opportunities to reduce false alarms in the future. 
• Embracing Complexity: Recognise that life, the work we do and the systems we use are complex and that understanding these dynamics requires continuous effort, communication and adaptation, and on occasion, failure.
• Valuing Diverse Perspectives: Encourage diverse viewpoints and interpretations to enrich the sensemaking processes. This means ensuring that everyone can speak up with an observation, not just those who have the loudest voice or are considered experts in the field.

Psychological safety creates an environment where employees feel safe to report weak signals, even at risk of reporting a false alarm. Indeed, a false alarm itself is an opportunity to learn and improve the clarity and integrity of systems so that weak signals can be better identified amongst the noise.

We’re never going to pick up all the signals, and nor do we probably want to, since processing and evaluating them all would be prohibitively difficult. “The only way to guarantee to detect all signals is to devote attention entirely and continuously to the one process on which the critical signals are expected to appear.” (Moray and Inagaki, in The Field Guide to Understanding Human Error by Sidney Dekker).

Sensemaking

Karl Weick’s concept of “Sensemaking in Organizations” revolves around how people construct reality in uncertain and complex environments, which involves interpreting and giving meaning to events. I feel that this idea is fundamental to the practice of Amplifying Weak Signals.

Key aspects of Weick’s sensemaking include:

Enactment: This involves individuals taking actions and then interpreting the world around them based on these actions. In the context of weak signals, this could mean noticing an anomaly (action) and then constructing a narrative around its potential implications (interpretation).

Retrospective Meaning: Weick emphasises that sensemaking is generally retrospective: we make sense of events only after they happen. Recognising weak signals may involve looking back at a series of small, perhaps seemingly unrelated events, and piecing them together to understand a larger connection.

Social Context: Sensemaking is a social process, and requires a psychologically safe, and ideally diverse group, where team members feel comfortable sharing their interpretations and perspectives. This is vital for building a collective understanding of, and amplifying, weak signals.

Ongoing Process: Sensemaking is an ongoing process. As new information emerges, we can update our interpretation and understanding of the signals. This is essential in monitoring and responding to weak signals and emerging patterns over time.

The amplification of weak signals can be seen as a fundamental part of Weick’s sensemaking process. By encouraging open communication and interpretation of signals, we can amplify these signals, connect them to other signals, identify and interpret patterns, and take appropriate action.

Psychological Safety and Weak Signals

While Weick’s primary focus isn’t on psychological safety per se, his ideas about the social and interpretative nature of sensemaking require psychological safety as a foundation if it’s to be successful. Psychological safety ensures that employees feel safe to share their observations and interpretations, a key element in sensemaking. In environments lacking psychological safety, crucial information that could be used for sensemaking, such as weak signals, might be withheld due to fear of negative consequences.

I think it’s useful to draw again on Nate Silver’s work, in separating “the Signal and the Noise”: the main theme of Silver’s work is distinguishing between signal (meaningful data or patterns) and noise (random or irrelevant data). In the context of weak signals, this translates to identifying subtle yet important indicators amidst everything else that we observe in our daily work. It also means being careful to avoid the seductive trap of simply gathering more and more data in the hope that we discover insights: rather than finding the needle in the haystack, organisations are often guilty of simply making the haystack bigger. 

Identifying the weak signal, the needle in the haystack, means working to overcome our existing biases, and fostering psychological safety in order that we may hear the quiet voices as well as the weak signals. Silver describes success as getting “less and less and less wrong” by continually looking for signals, adapting our models, learning from successful (and unsuccessful) predictions and interpretations, and ensuring a cross-disciplinary approach in order to mitigate our own organisational blind spots.

Amplifying weak signals is not just a technical challenge, it’s a cultural one, founded in the way we perceive and react to the subtle hints of potential issues. Teams and organisations that practise this well stand a far better chance of averting disasters and capitalising on opportunities. Sensemaking and amplifying weak signals are core components of the Observe and Orient capacities of OODA loops.

The challenge with weak signals, unlike other aspects of psychological safety, is that we may have no idea whether the weak signal is a signal at all. It may well be nothing of significance, so the benefit of speaking up is far less certain. This makes our mental cost/benefit calculation of whether it’s worth speaking up more difficult. The key lies in ensuring that we create a psychologically safe enough environment where people can speak up, even if they have no idea whether what they’re seeing is important. Because it just might be absolutely critical, like if you think you saw the same cat twice. 

Thanks to Chris Bliss for the Amplify Weak Signals graphic, which you can now purchase as a sticker in our online shop! 

*In contrast to Wonko The Sane who says “a scientist must also be absolutely like a child. If he sees a thing, he must say that he sees it, whether it was what he thought he was going to see or not. See first, think later, then test. But always see first. Otherwise you will only see what you were expecting.“
(Douglas Adams, in So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish)

Related articles

The strategic strength of weak signal analysis

Organizing and the Process of Sensemaking

Tacit knowledge and weak signals in organization learning: managing knowledge to create sustainable competitive advantage

Two Nordstrom Case Studies from The DevOps Handbook through the Lens of Slowification, Simplification, Amplification

Early warnings, weak signals and learning from healthcare disasters

Building HyperAwareness: How to Amplify Weak External Signals for Improved Strategic Agility

Wild cards, weak signals and organisational improvisation

How to Make Sense of Weak Signals

Filters of weak signals hinder foresight: Monitoring weak signals efficiently in corporate decision-making

Drifting into failure: theorising the dynamics of disaster incubation

Resilience Engineering : Concepts and Precepts

The collapse of sensemaking in organizations: The Mann Gulch disaster. 

Making Sense of Sensemaking in Organization Studies

Related psychsafety.com articles:

Normalisation of Deviance

Normal Accidents

Retrospectives

Statistical Process Control: Understanding Variation

Complexity

Psychological Safety Workshops

You can now book on each of the psychological safety online workshops! Options include Intermediate, Advanced, Management, Measurement, Practices, and the new Train-The-Trainer supplementary workshop. 

Psychsafety.com courses all now come with Credly Badges! After completion of the course, you’ll receive an email to claim your badge, which you can use to evidence your CPD and share on your LinkedIn profile.

Note: in addition to affordability based pricing, we now offer one free scholarship place on every workshop we deliver. If you would like to request one of these free spaces, email me (tom@psychsafety.com). The scholarship is intended for those for whom any payment at all is out of reach. Preference is given to people in lower-income countries and from disadvantaged or under-represented groups. 

Psychological Safety at Work

Every year, NASA holds a Day of Remembrance to commemorate and remember those people lost, reflect on why we explore space, and (re)commit to safety practices. Here is a recording of the live stream of the NASA Safety Town Hall for the Day of Remembrance 2024, remembering the crews of Apollo 1, space shuttles Challenger and Columbia, and all members of the NASA family who lost their lives while furthering the cause of exploration and discovery. This is an incredible event, and I strongly recommend watching the recording – I believe events like these serve as visceral reminders of what can happen if we allow ourselves to passively descend into groupthink, normalisation of deviance and organisational silence, and serve to prevent such disasters in the future.

In reflection on the organisational culture leading up to the Challenger disaster and the concerns surrounding the SRB O-rings that became brittle in low temperatures, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson states, “They begged their management, and their management ignored it.“

“Whatever the technical reason is, the real reason is a lack of communication. And especially a lack of communication between those on the line, with the upper levels that’ll ultimately make the final decision to go.“


And this is an incredible piece by Heather Burns with some powerful observations about NASA’s annual day of remembrance, “Those who choose not to heal.“:

“…it’s remarkable that in this world, despite all that, there are leaders who choose, every year, to stand up in front of the people they lead, and choose not to heal. Not out of self-pity, not out of attention-seeking, and not out of any emotionally manipulative moves for control. They do that because they’re fundamentally good people.

They deny themselves the opportunity to heal so that no one, sitting in front of them, will ever hurt like that again.“


Thanks to Andrew Doran for sharing Heather’s article with me.

This is a fantastic piece by Wendy Grossman on the ongoing troubles at Boeing, in context of wider issues in the aviation industry, particuarly in the US, regarding capacity pressures and resourcing. Wendy critiques Boeing’s culture shift towards prioritising profits over engineering excellence, a change attributed in the main though its merger with McDonnell Douglas in 1997. The recent series of safety incidents at Boeing has led to increased scrutiny and regulatory action, suggesting Boeing must undergo a (re)transformation back towards that engineering culture.

“The blame and discipline culture that we have is the biggest obstacle to everything else…. We have to undo what we have created.“
This is a great episode of the Leading Safely podcast with Georgina Poole, titled “Blame Fixes Nothing”, with Nicole Zerbel Ivers. Worth a listen.

And here’s a podcast from the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health on patient safety, and how if staff feel psychologically safe, children are safer in their care.

This week’s poem

Theodore Roosevelt’s “The Man in the Arena”, from a speech delivered at the Sorbonne, Paris, April 23, 1910.

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

This, I understand, was the inspiration for Brene Brown’s work on courage and daring.