The Three-Box Solution Playbook

2

GATHERING WEAK SIGNALS

To identify future market discontinuities, you must gather weak signals—emergent changes to technology, culture, markets, the economy, consumer tastes and behavior, and demographics. As the name suggests, weak signals are hard to evaluate because they are incomplete, unsettled, and unclear. But they are the raw material for making hypotheses about nonlinear changes in the future. These changes feed into generating Box 3 ideas that usually lie at the intersection of multiple market discontinuities.

An understanding of weak signals starts with three basic questions:

1. What factors and conditions contribute to the success of our current business model?
2. Which of these factors might change over time—or are changing already—thus ...