đĄ I was recently talking to an old friend. A Sunday afternoon at Ground Control, in Paris’s 12th arrondissement. Early July 2026.
We sit outside and talk about the economy, AI, training and companies. Then he mentions two words that make me sit up: weak signals.
It takes me a few seconds to understand why the idea has struck a chord.
Then it comes back to me.
Flashback â Summer 2026
A few weeks earlier, I was delivering an Advanced Project Management course for a major French food company.
June 2026, in Paris’s 15th arrondissement. Seven executives from a large company. We are sitting on stools around a high table.
Value, business cases, predictive and agile strategies: all logical, expected topics.
Then comes the final session on the second day: an introduction to risk. I announce that we are about to explore… weak signals.
The participants are a little tired, but they sit up in their seats. Their attention sharpens.
What is a weak signal?
I display a series of micro-events observed during a project. Their task is to identify what might â or might not â qualify as a weak signal. And, above all, to explain why.
The discussion becomes animated â and soon more important than the slides.
One participant describes a colleague who has been attending fewer and fewer meetings. Another mentions a supplier’s repeated delays.
Then one participant realises that he may just have received a weak signal himself:
âI’ve just received an invitation from senior management to discuss Project XY…â
And that is when I understand. Or at least, this is my interpretation: we are no longer talking only about project management. We are talking about attention. What is changing around us that we have not yet noticed?
In a world where everything is interconnected, we need to be able to detect a change of course amid a constant flood of information. A weak signal means observing, taking note and perhaps anticipating a problem that is beginning to take shape far away.
And is heading our way.
During this session, we looked at how to spot small deviations, identify recurring patterns and challenge the robustness of our initial assumptions.
But for a moment, above all, we forgot about the slides. We observed the world and tried to see what really matters.
Back to Ground Control on that Sunday afternoon.
A friend talking to me about weak signals just a few weeks after that course â could that, in itself, be… a weak signal? đ
