Beware the Rapids of Change

SOUNDINGS

Traveling the Mississippi one needs to look up and down the river for flotsam and river traffic; but the river’s flow forever changes the channel’s bottom so that one needs to plumb the depth to keep from running aground while navigating.

Soundings senses the near term while keeping the longer term in view. Three areas of focus: Knowledge Management, Economics/Finance and the Environment broadly defined. Changing conditions require the appropriate sensors for viewing.

We swim in the river of time. How we perceive our movement becomes critical. For example, we believe that it was a giant meteor that struck the planet and wiped out the dinosaurs. Yet the evidence indicates that their demise occurred over many years post the impact. In other words, the event was not an instantaneous event, except on paper that graphs the earth’s history.  Today we are concerned about “tipping points”, events that appear to represent a paradigm shift such as the adoption of computers in schools or the broader digital revolution in its many forms. Other tipping points have been evoked to talk about collapse from climate change as an example.

In 2012 Lamberson and Page, in a Santa Fe Institute Working Paper (Tipping Points, 2012-2-002) finally provided a concrete, mathematical, definition that had only been, up to this point a qualitative, graphic, one-dimensional definition of “Tipping Points”. The article classified these “events” by type and provided criteria for careful analysis. One of the immediate results was to point out that how one represented the information in graphical form could mask or create such events. More interestingly, the analysis would show that under defined parameters it could be shown that, like chicken pox, the tipping point occurred long before its effects became evident. Or, such “events” might happen but they did not manifest in the dramatic “hockey stick” rise or as a significant disruption.

The Gartner Group, which tracks technological change, has created what they call The Hype Cycle (c.f. the eponymous book by Fenn and Raskino). They basically have graphically transformed the idea of a tipping point for many technologies into a curve that tracks the rapid rise, dramatic fall and recovery into a traditional growth curve. This creates an interesting story but, as mentioned above, is largely dependent on how these trends are mapped.  A similar idea was developed by George Land in a volume, Grow or Die.

Drawing on Stephen Wolfram’s seminal volume, A New Kind of Science, Lamberson and Page note that there are tips that change the system’s behavior and ones that do not. There are political, physical and economic systems that fall into four classes: fixed point, periodic, random and complex.  What we see depends on the system’s behavior moving from one class to another. Most of the simple representations of tipping points stay within a very simple model. What the Lamberson and Page model does is remove the constraints that are created by a single vision and a possible misreading of the present and future and provides a foundation for a sound evaluation. It provides a tool set that anticipates alternatives rather than proscribing.