When I was five years old, I loved tales about soldiers.

So, settle down and let me tell you a story about some soldiers.

In the late 16^th century or thereabouts, while journeying through Mont Blanc an Italian infantryman saw a band of invading French men and shouted to his comrades “All’erta”. The Italian soldier’s comrades swiftly responded by moving to a high grassy knoll lookout, where they could stand watch over the French troops without losing their strategic position.

The French upon hearing this word often from the Italian infantry, learned what it meant and they adopted the word.

Consequently, All’erta became ál’erte which meant “watchful” or “vigilant”.

Throughout history there have been methods of alarms and alerts to tell us when danger presents itself. A call to arms. A trigger for action. Remain vigilant, be responsive and act accordingly.

Our first Alerts

Humans respond to sensory warnings, alerting us about impending danger or leading us to rewards. It is the way we deal with these alerts in our daily life that defines who we are and possibly how successful we become.

Technology has improved our alert handling and has allowed us to efficiently manage our days and our lives but if handled inefficiently we risk ‘alert overload’.

We utilise a whole range of methodologies and ideologies to handle events and alerts.

In my experience there are many different types of alert receivers all handling alerts in their own way.

Carl Jung defined the Jungian archetypes so I decided much like Carl did, to define these Monitoring archetypes. Check out my next Blog article to find out more.