This election cycle has been the most passionate in modern American memory. No matter who wins there are big thinkers who believe it will mark an inflection point in American history.
What do they mean by “inflection point”?
What this election may turn out to be instead is a good example of how the passions of the present make it hard to stand apart from what we feel and to think with rigor about change.
Start with this: An inflection point is a moment or an event after which the context in which we operate is transformed – permanently. Common examples are electrification, the building of national highway systems, Second Wave feminism, climate change and the reimagining of the Internet as a consumer phenomenon. All of these changed not just how we behave but, over time, how we think.
Inflection point false positives
Full disclosure: There is no alarm system that can tell us when a transformative moment has arrived. That is why there are so many false sightings of inflection points.
We regularly hear people respond to some event with “This changes everything.” Then with hindsight the big event is understood as just the volatility that characterizes any system, something individuals cared a great deal about at the time, but which did not change the context in which they led their lives.
For Americans 9/11 might qualify as an example, or Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. As violent and catastrophic as these events were, did they restructure the global power balance, let alone reorient our everyday lives?
Maybe the answer to that question is: not yet.
It is a nuisance that we can only confirm inflection points in retrospect, after our ability to act has been seriously constrained or, for that matter, generously expanded. Who imagined, for example, that when the iPhone was introduced in 2007 that not twenty years later what once seemed like a new cool mobile phone would have us living our lives in constant connectivity and worrying about the psychological harm to adolescents? Those impacts needed time to play out before we could notice them, let alone know how to think about them.
For all we can’t stop talking about it in 2024, for instance, we don’t know yet whether artificial intelligence will be existentially transformative for human beings or “just” a tremendously powerful new tool for doing jobs we have always done.
Our reflex is to plan our future by drawing on the past. Faced with something new in our experience there is very little past to which to make reference. But it is still possible to develop an organizational reflex for responding to inflection points when they finally become evident, creating a posture more powerful and less reactive than mere “resilience.”
We can start by building an organizational habit of spotting big changes by being precise in the way we toss around terms like “inflection points.”
Learning to think about great change
Our friend and colleague Charles Thomas argues that a genuinely disruptive change either removes a serious a vulnerability for human life or introduces one. It does not change what’s important. It changes how we know what’s important.
A technique for gaining this kind of insight is to ask your team to name something that could put the organization out of business within the next three years. How might that happen? You probably won’t be right; being right is not really the point. The point is to learn lessons about decision making under conditions of great uncertainty. The point is to develop a muscle for thinking about the truly new.
Among its other virtues this practice can put a brake on the impulse to chase every novel event that comes along. It can help separate the transformative from the noisy attention-getter. It can help an organization develop a sensitivity to what FSG scenario consultants call “cross impacts.”
Cross impacts are often the second- and third-order consequences of a big event. A good example is the bounce that Covid gave to working from home and to the technologies that support it. The two phenomena had been building for years, and only needed a catalytic event to ignite. The same was true of the messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) technology, which had been around for years before being applied to the vaccines that vanquished Covid-19.
Cross impacts sneak up on us. Just ask anyone who owned an AM radio station in the United States twenty years ago. They may have viewed the arrival of the Internet as a consumer technology as interesting but unrelated to their core business. Instead it accelerated a collection of negatives that had been gathering for some time, leading to a steady decline in the industry.
It is too soon to know whether the outcome of the U.S. election will be an inflection point, or what its cross impacts will be. It is not too soon to start asking good questions about the meaning of the changes the election may bring, lessening the risk of surprise and sharpening the instinct for seeing opportunity.
So will the 2024 election represent a true inflection point? We don’t know, obviously. But applying this framework to it, we can ask: will it add a vulnerability to human existence, or remove one? Fairly clearly, it will not remove a basic vulnerability. No matter which side wins, it could add one. Those who believe that Trump winning represents a direct threat to rule of law and stability obviously think that could be an inflection point: it is hard to imagine the changes he might institute (e.g. appointing a majority of the Supreme Court if two conservative justices retire, or allowing Elon Musk to hugely cut the executive branch) being reversed for a very long time. Yet even if Harris wins, the broader populist Trump phenomenon will not disappear soon; the continuing governmental gridlock, with the parties controlling separate branches of government, straining the Constitution, and probably deepening divisions between “red” and “blue,” may be the real inflection point, paralyzing American government at a critical historic moment. The point, as you say, is not to predict one outcome; it is to develop a deeper strategic understanding of the real issues at hand – getting beyond the simplistic “If our side wins everything will be good/If their side wins everything will be bad” approach.
I like your insight, Pat. It is in our natures to want every complex issue to be reduced to a binary: if this, then that. If that, then this. I can’t think of any grand transformation that was all one thing or another. The iPhone example in the essay is an example of what I mean.
Even the Great Plague has been credited with an upside: Slaughtering European peasants at such a rate gave those who survived a new—an historic—leverage in selling their labor. It would have been better if that outcome had been accomplished without the catalyst of a murderous disease. But it’s what happened. And I think that’s your point.
Thank you, Kevin…timely to say the least. While reading, it occurred to me that we often think of transformative events as somehow dramatic – the explosive revelation at the end of Scene Three just before intermission. I’ll bet many (perhaps the most meaningful) have been quite mundane. I doubt that the engineers building London’s early sewage system realized they were breaking ground on a transformative event that would end much human suffering forever AND begin a march toward attention to public health.
Your essay may not relieve much current anxiety, but I think it reminds us to take a breath, engage in some reflection, and remember – we cannot prevent surprises, but we can be prepared for how to think about them and react with deliberated strategic intent.
I agreed completely, Tom. I am always struck by how often revolutions–in an organization or in a society–come from a direction where no one is looking.
The practice of scenario planning has taught me that all of us have a habit of taking only a single perspective on great change, and then generalizing from there. There is no single perspective on great change.
Add to this the inevitability that, from one direction or another, people and events will push back—often, as you point out, subtly but inevitably.
One problem with inflection points is that they are often hard to measure, or they creep up slowly, unnoticed. The Irreversible Global Warming inflection point may yet be in our future or, some will tell us, it may already be history. Hard to tell. Another inflection point of perhaps comparable magnitude is fairly easy to measure but has largely gone unnoticed: the global collapse in fertility rates. The consequence of Mao’s one child policy is widely known, and to a lesser degree so is the fall in fertility rates in the wealthy countries of East Asia and Western Europe, which are now well below replacement levels. Less well known is the fact that the Asian Sub-Continent — hardly a bastion of wealthy economies — is at or close to replacement rates, including Bangladesh. In all the World, only Sub-Saharan Africa is significantly above replacement rates, but even there fertility rates are falling rapidly. So, income levels seem to have little to do with fertility rate decline; apparently, it is suggested, the driving factor is simply that women are choosing to have fewer children because that is what they want and they seem to now know how to achieve their objective. Whatever the reason, we are close to the inflection point where global population will begin to fall and the total global labor force should begin shrinking in 15 years.
Agree with you Robert – significant demographic changes are relatively slow moving and are perceived as ‘inflection points’ only in the broader sweep of history. But you raise two of enormous significance – the decline in China’s population (a fall of c. 220 million by 2060), and the increase in Africa’s – expected to grow by 1.25 billion, nearly doubling over the same period. Even with a marked increase in the pace of economic development, population on the African continent is predicted to grow by more than 50%. Both of these changes are almost certain to have profound geopolitical repercussions. Without exceptional productivity growth China’s economy will stutter, eroding government support, and in Africa it is hard not to imagine climate change leading to instability and mass migration. In both cases long term trends could produce sudden, explosive events.
Gerard, I appreciate your agreement, but it was a little bit off my mark as you focused on the potential population growth in sub-Saharan Africa. This reminded me of the general overpopulation frenzy of the 1960’s when the US government began to worry about “The Population Bomb” thanks in part to the writings of Paul Ehrlich.
With over 50 years of this kind of thinking the nature of the inflection point that we are facing may be hard to understand. Fertility rates below ~2.1, as we now have in East Asia, Europe from the Ireland to Russia and in most of the Americas results in serious rates of population decline. The rates currently seen in these regions can result in about a 20% fall in population over 50 years and in 50% over 100 years. If Trump loses and the US continues to take in and acculturate high numbers of Immigrants, the US may become not just the richest but also the largest country in the world
And this inflection point suggests something that maybe FSG should point out: FSG’s predecessor organization, The Futures Group, had a component that was a dominant player in the USAID programs to defuse The Population Bomb. TFG for over a decade was the world’s largest marketer of condoms and perhaps more importantly ran extensive programs in female education teaching girls and women what they could do to control their reproduction. Evidently that component of TFG’s work may be the key factor driving down fertility rates in all those odd places TFG consulting used to have offices.
TFG began its population control efforts in the 1980s. Since then Sub Saharan Africa fertility rates have dropped from about 6.8 to about 4.4 in 2022. In Central and South Asia it has gone from about 5.0 to about 2.3 in 2022, and in Latin America over the same period from about 5.0 to 1.8. I hope TFG had some type of performance riders in their contracts.