One swallow doesn't make a summer: taking weak signals seriously.

One swallow doesn't make a summer, as the saying goes. It comes from a fable by Aesop: a man who has squandered all his money sees a swallow, decides winter is over and sells his coat. The frost returns, the swallow freezes to death and the man meets the same fate. In short: a single observation is no guarantee of structural change.

Read this article as the sequel to the canary in the coal mine. The lesson of the canary is to see signals in time and not to wave them away too quickly. The lesson of the swallow is not to go too far in the other direction. Together they stand for the same thing: a monitoring system that picks up change early without overrating every fledgling signal. In this article you will read how to tell noise, one-off events, emerging trends and system breaks apart, which seven tests help you substantiate an early signal, and how an escalation ladder takes you from observing to acting.

This is part four of Jeroen Toet's blog series Strategic bird guide: bird language in the boardroom.

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Jeroen Toet is a senior strategist at Jester Strategy and co-author of the book Scenario Planning in Practice. For over 10 years he has helped organisations in the private and public sector make future-proof choices using foresight methods, including scenario planning.

Questions about the article? Get in touch with Jeroen: j.toet@jester.nl or +31 6 11 45 13 11.