Unifying weak signals definitions to improve construct understanding

The research into the perception of early signals, the so-called weak signals, started in the field of strategic planning in the 1970s. Soon, research dispersed into new, specialized fields, such as foresight, sense-making, and entrepreneurial alertness. Each field used different terms for weak signals and framed the research in its own...

Straws That Tell the Wind: Top-Manager Perception of Distant Signals of the Future

This dissertation was prompted by its author’s amazement that only a handful of financial experts had read the arrival of the 2009 recession in the subprime mortgage problems in the American housing market. Despite hefty confrontations in the media between investment experts during the years leading up to the recession, it took the fall of...

Compensating for perceptual filters in weak signal assessments

The effect of ambiguous and non-salient information on the managerial interpretive process is rarely investigated, although this information is considered to be the basis for strategic decision-making and requires a different process due to its ill-defined nature. This paper explores the process that outperforming managers used to detect and...

Weak signal detection on twitter datasets: A non-accumulated approach for non-famous events

With the rise of social networking platforms, a great amount of data has been generated. Extracting information regarding interesting events from this large data pool has become an interesting direction of research. Multiple tools have been built for this challenge. Detecting the signals for a target event has thus become a crucial task and it...

Identifying and responding to weak signals to improve learning from experiences in high-risk industry

1. Context This thesis forms part of an extended study funded by FonCSI (Fondation pour une Culture de Sécurité Industrielle) about learning systems of major hazard companies. All French industrial sites running a risky activity – e.g. petrochemicals, steel making plants – must put a Safety Management System in place, according to the Seveso II...