Things don’t change (black) until they do (white). But the reality of this blunt statement is that it unfolds as a grey spectrum rather than a black-to-white shift. Within that gradient of greys, one day we stopped paying attention, and the next day the anecdotal has become ubiquitous.
Regarding the topic, I have the feeling that this manifest in everything that has the network effect so common to human society, where the trends are set by a majority that seems to have no brain and no direction. Until this majority shows that it does have a mind.
I think sudden political changes provide a context where it is easy to see the underlying dynamics that I am trying to describe.
In a hypothetical (or common days) political scene two parties, A and B, are exchanging power and nothing seems to change much. Despite the permanent opposition of parties C, D and E. Despite the news blast following every election and the hopes it carries. Despite the sharp opinion of analysts. despite promises going on for years. The machine goes onward and nothing changes.
Suddenly C becomes prominent and earns power to unprecedented level. This feels sudden to the faithful supporters of both A and B, even though they may not have shown up at the poll station this time, because, they too, are tired of it. This feels sudden to the people that voted for C for years, because they were convinced, but power never seemed to swing their way. This feels sudden to people who just switched to C as they knew others that did it before, yet nothing seemed to change.
The next day, the media will probably slightly tune in to the normal and make it sound as if it was “so easy to see it coming”. But I would argue that for many, if not most, it appeared unexpected. Those who expected it got the timing wrong.
No actor was overseeing the coordination of the whole society, yet it seemed to happen.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book The Black Swan discussed in length unexpected changes and surprisingly large outcomes. Donald Trump’s election triggered a tech mogul metamorphosis into politician, a crypto rally to levels that were predicted every year without ever being reached and the unprecedented unlocking of the military help to Ukrainians (in both quality and quantity). These outcomes, seen as far-fetched just six months before the election, became reality.
I would argue that politics are far from being the only topic to be like this.
Ecosystems are known to collapse in a sudden fashion.
Technology has its annual or biannual batch of promises that never seem to make it. Big data was supposed to change everything, did it? Before it, semantic models? The current AI wave is not the first AI wave.
And if some trends did not fully make it, some changes took time and were very radical for some. Internet was probably only seen as another media, web 2.0 was probably a vague concept in some press articles, but for encyclopedia publishers the arrival of Wikipedia finished off their industry.
Digital cameras were a second pick compared to analog, until they were not. Smartphone cameras were clearly not suited for anything else than bad amateurs photography, yet they are now the norm for most content producers aka influencers.
Clayton Christensen’s Innovator’s Dilemma actually discusses how inferior disruptive innovation slowly ramps up to eat incumbent competition, and perhaps this is not as much related to a network effect. But the feeling of sudden change is very similar. Technology products are as much about technology maturity as they are about adoptions. The dominance of Teams compared to Slack is a great example, where the inferior product won by strongly leveraging its superior distribution channel.
I am clueless about where the scale will be tipped but there are a few topics on which lengthy discussions have been happening for a long time and expectations remain unmet.
Where technology is a limiting factor:
- Autonomous transportation
- Pleasant self-service support through AI, or better search, or similar case research and retrieval
- Fusion energy
- Any long-lasting, portable and cheap energy like hydrogen-based energy
Where organizational changes or leadership are needed:
- Digitalization of old western states
- Proper healthcare data centralization for end-user access and public benefits
- Augmented reality
- Universal basic income
