I recently read an innovative article on Dynamic Signals by David Armano. There’s a bigger issue here that David has touched on. How do we discern the signals and add context around them to decode them properly? The signals are large and small messages emanating from individuals. David introduced the concept, but didn’t go a step further and develop a business reason for decoding them and applying them to solve business objectives.

I’d like to take a stab at it.  First, signals can become noise and thus useless if not channeled properly.  Think of it as trying to communicate in the middle of Grand Central Station at rush hour.  You’re not going to effectively communicate. 

Yet tools that can parse all the noise and direct them to you are valuable because they educate you on current customers, prospects, competitors and even fellow employees.  Once channeled properly, the trick is to provide proper context around the signals.  How do we know what all the signals mean in a given context?  How do we know if our best customer is really happy with us or searching for an alternative product or service? 

I’ll submit the answer is to leverage technology to channel the signals then analyze the signals with human intelligence.  Until there is an effective artificial intelligence system, we can’t possibly decipher the signals without human intervention.  A service like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk provides inexpensive human intelligence to analyze the signals and provide proper context.  Better, large corporations should task employees with  aggregating and providing context about their customer’s signals.  The compiled information is potentially priceless.  It’s like a real time customer service survey. 

Want to steal customers from your competitors?  Analyze the signals and change your sales messaging to address competitor shortcomings.  If you’re an Executive and want to find out how effective your direct reports, and reports of your direct reports are managing projects; then analyze the signals and contextualize them.  Instead of noise, you’ll get direct communication from the front lines without filters. 

Those examples above are valuable and that is why Armano’s idea should be codified and a solution developed.