One of the most difficult challenges companies face is knowing when the environment they’re used to operating in is shifting. Often, identifying the change requires reading and acting upon ambiguous, inconclusive bits of information that are mixed into the “noise” of everyday activities and therefore easy to overlook. The “weak digital signals” may emerge initially as blips, but they can grow swiftly to transform the very foundations of an industry.
To companies in the packaged software industry in the 1990s, a weak digital signal would have been the idea of software as a service delivered over the cloud. Senior managers at Oracle and SAP may not have comprehended the scale and speed at which software would migrate to the cloud, but they could have imagined the shift and understood its meaning. Similarly, big-box retailers like Best Buy might have detected signs in the early 2000s that a company like Amazon might one day become a competitor for appliance sales.