How to tell the signal from the noise

Welcome to The Signal.

This is the first issue of The Signal, the monthly companion on the hidden networks behind how we decide and how we change. The name is not decoration. Almost everything we try to understand about people and organisations arrives as noise: too many voices, too many anecdotes, too many numbers pointing in different directions. The hard part is not collecting more of it. The hard part is telling the signal, the pattern that actually matters, from the static around it.

For twenty years that has been my work, and the instrument I keep reaching for is social network analysis. It does one thing very well. It stops looking at people one at a time and starts measuring the relationships between them. That shift, from counting actors to mapping connections, is often what turns noise into signal. Let me show you with three studies.

Thread one: water governance

For my doctorate I reconstructed how the water-governance network of one region, the Okanagan, changed over fifty years. The noise was the official record: org charts, committee lists, who held which title. The signal was who actually talked to whom, and it rarely matched. The people moving decisions were often the quiet connectors between groups, not the names at the top. And it only became visible over time. A single snapshot would have shown a tidy structure that did not really exist. The fifty-year view showed the real one forming and reforming as drought and politics moved around it.

Thread two: a drought, online

During the 2026 Okanagan drought I turned the same lens on something faster and messier: the online conversation about the drought itself. Thousands of comments, all noise, or so it looked. But map who replies to whom, who gets amplified, and who sits at the centre, and a clear signal appears. A small number of accounts and a few tight clusters carry most of the misinformation, and a handful of bridges move it from the fringe into the mainstream. You cannot argue with a thousand voices. You can understand a structure, and a structure you can act on.

Thread three: learning in a crisis

On a United Nations study I mapped the networks behind distance education for refugees in Jordan and Uganda. Survey answers about whether remote learning worked were all over the place, the usual noise. The signal was relational: who learners actually turned to when the technology failed, the teachers, siblings, and neighbours holding the system together off the record. That support network was invisible in any survey total, and it was the thing most worth strengthening.

The common thread

In every one of these the noise was real, and it was loud. The signal was quieter, structural, and almost invisible until we measured the relationships instead of the parts. That is the whole idea behind this newsletter and the videos that go with it. Each month I will take one of these threads and pull it: a study, a method, or a decision, and show you where the signal was hiding.

One caution, because I am a stickler for it. A method that finds signal can also invent it. Part of my recent work has been testing which network measures are actually trustworthy in the first place, because a signal you cannot trust is just confident noise.

Next month I will pull one of these threads all the way through.

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Until the next signal,

Nelson