“Gradually, then Suddenly”:
Why Change Has Become So Quick
by Dee Smith, CEO
[part one of two]
We are suddenly confronted—on all sides, it seems—with abrupt and wrenching change, with transformations that few if any of us expected to see or can easily understand.
Why is this occurring? Or perhaps more to the point, why is it so surprising to so many of us? These are two distinct but nevertheless related questions.
In the late 20th century, new mathematical models and enhanced computational power fueled a real revolution in our understanding of complex systems. Much of this revolution remains poorly understood—if it is understood at all by the general public.
Why is it important? Because discoveries about complex systems revealed that they all exhibit a shared set of attributes. They have hidden links and feedback loops. They engender enormous unintended and unexpected consequences. They are inherently unstable and fragile under certain conditions. Furthermore, they are liable to abrupt change including “tipping points,” cascading phenomena, and amplification of events.
The rigorous mathematical study of what is known as non-linear dynamics has revealed key characteristics that such complex systems display. They are not complicated to explain, although some of them seem counterintuitive, or even contradictory.
One of the most intriguing is homeostasis, a dynamic process that is characteristic of complex systems that maintain stability, despite disturbances, as long as conditions stay within a certain range. And yet outside that range, even small changes can have dramatic consequences. Inputs of the “right” kind, at the “right” time, into a system that has been stable can cause massive changes in the system’s state.
In some cases, systems can generate dramatic change themselves when they approach a critical point of phase transition. More generally, however, systems remain vulnerable to massive changes in state caused by external agents. Think of the introduction of a small amount of cyanide or polonium-210 into a living human body. It will change its state from living to dead very quickly in most cases.
The key point of all this is that change often happens abruptly, not gradually. And there are many reasons why abrupt change happens. The more complex a system is, the more vectors—the more inputs—of change will impact all the elements within the system. So change can increase exponentially.
The nature of abrupt change has been demonstrated and modeled mathematically. A Danish physicist named Per Bak studied it through the seemingly unlikely medium of sand piles. As it turns out, if you drop grains of sand on a sand pile, one by one, the pile becomes larger and more unstable. But grains of sand do not fall off in sequence, one by one, as each additional grain is added. Instead, they build up until, at a moment that cannot be predicted with any precision, a large part of the sand pile suddenly collapses in a kind of tiny avalanche. It is a bit like how Ernest Hemingway answered the question of how he went bankrupt: “Gradually. Then suddenly.”
This may seem mundane, but ask yourself why you are so surprised by sudden change and you will see that it is not. Think of putting a glass of ice outside on one of the hot days we are now experiencing almost everywhere. Once it warms to 0°C (32°F), it quickly changes its phase state from solid to liquid—in other words, it melts. It doesn’t stay part water and part ice for long on a hot day. And no single molecule is ever half-frozen and half-melted. It changes abruptly from frozen to liquid.
Many unimportant as well as very important changes in our own lives happen suddenly. You don’t have a car wreck over a period of several weeks, or a heart attack over a period of months. Why then are we so surprised when we encounter sudden change?
There are various ideas about this—including the suggestion that it may be due to the human brain’s inbuilt need to conserve energy. After all, it takes less thinking to deal with continuity than with change. There is also an evolutionary argument. Homo sapiens and our progenitors adapted over millions of years to a world in which change was usually very slow and sudden change simply resulted in death. This is all speculation, but whatever the reason, it is a very old question, closely related to one known to philosophers as the “problem of induction”—simply put, that things stay the same until they don’t.
It is a real problem, however, and it skews our perception time and time again. In the run-up to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, for example, many highly informed experts were certain that Russia would not invade. Their rationale was primarily that there had been no major war in Europe for 70 years. This is the problem with induction—believing that the past is a reliable guide to the future—and it leads to what in the intelligence world is called “failure of imagination.”
Putin himself was apparently subject to a “failure of imagination” in making his decision to invade Ukraine. The various tepid responses of the West and of the United States in particular to his actions during the previous 2 decades—in Georgia, in Syria, and in Ukraine itself in 2014 —and the disastrous American withdrawal from Afghanistan, impressed the idea on Putin that the West would do little if he simply took Ukraine by force.
So, if we can’t use the past as a reliable guide to the future, what can we use? This is a good question.
If we step back, however, we should now be able to suggest at least provisional responses to the two questions that I asked in the opening paragraphs.
Why does it seem change is so much more sudden and wrenching today? Because it is! We have unquestionably created the most complex human society with the most multifarious and most interlocking systems that have ever existed. And its complexity is increasing daily—even hourly. Dynamic complex systems in which complexity is increasing are especially prone to rapid transformation and unpredictability. So it should not seem hard to understand that this is resulting in more accelerated change—of larger scope, across more domains, at greater speed, and with more unpredictability— than we have ever seen before. Simply because of the nature of complex systems, we have passed into a state where change is accelerating and becoming more non-linear, with more unforeseen—and sometimes unforeseeable—effects and outcomes. And again because of the nature of the system and because of where we are at this point in history—a point to which I will return in a later post—change is becoming more radical. It represents departures further and further away from what we have known in the very recent past and what we have assumed will exist in the near future.
So why are we so surprised all the time? We are simply not mentally suited—we are not evolved—to deal with the current pace and scope of change. We have created a world transforming—technologically, socially, and environmentally—more rapidly than we can accept as individuals, as societies, and in fact as a planetary biological system.
More complexity equals more change equals more unpredictability equals more and greater risk. This is the world we have engineered, like it or not. We have made our bed.
[part one of two]