Early warning signals are the first important indications of a change. These may be understood as advanced, somewhat noisy and generally socially situated indicators of change in trends and systems that constitute raw informational material for enabling anticipatory action. Many times these signals are difficult to spot because they are indicating an unknown, unexpected or rare change which makes it hard to distinguish them as relevant. Therefore they are usually referred at as “faint” or “weak” signals. The benefits of early warning signals can be seen when assessing their significance in an organization or a field concerned and analyzing how the phenomena reflected by the early warning signals should be reacted on. There remains some confusion about the definition of early warning signals and related terminologies as faint or weak signals. Sometimes these terminologies are referred as future oriented information, sometimes more like emerging issues.
Hiltunen (2007) has tried to clarify the confusion about the weak signal definitions, by combining signal, issue and interpretation in the concept of the “future sign”, which more holistically describes how these signals relate to change. Citing from Igor Ansoff, Hiltunen (2007)2 provides a definition of weak signals as: “warnings (external or internal), events and developments that are still too incomplete to permit an accurate estimation of their impact and/or to determine their complete responses”. Early warning signals are meaningful as long as they are evaluated in the context of both their emergence and their evolution as a part of a pattern along with other early warning signals. They do not exist in isolation.
