You get that far and it seems as though the landscape you are looking at could stay that way for ever, pleasantly placid, with a few bends, a few rises and falls and the odd unexpected hairpin turn, because the panoramas granted to human beings are never arranged according to criteria of perfection and stasis. For a long time you imagine that your future will have the same colours as the past, the same shades, the same flourishes.
And yet, suddenly, here comes the change of state, here comes the tipping point, the instant beyond which everything changes and you begin to turn your gaze towards another landscape, different from the one you imagined would be there today and tomorrow. Critical points, points of no return, turning points are among the features that characterise complex systems.
Complex systems can have multiple stable states, which vary as the context evolves but share certain common denominators: the landscape is essentially the same. Systems can gravitate around certain attractor phenomena, remaining stable for a long time, sometimes for very long periods indeed, until they are significantly disturbed. If a change in the system crosses a certain threshold, it can quickly slip into another stable state, making the change difficult to reverse: new panoramas will reveal themselves, and our gaze can and must adjust to the new perspectives.
The Power of the turning point
It rolls down, suddenly. There it is, the tipping point. As though there were a sheer drop after a slow climb to the summit. As though you were first faced with a gentle slope and then a chasm opened up before you. Or conversely, in a positive sense, as though, after descending slowly and finally reaching the bottom of the barrel, you were to leap up and rise again with renewed energy. More precisely, it is what happens along a trajectory when the direction of motion changes.
That moment when a sudden change of state occurs: that is the tipping point. A few more examples.
The continents keep moving for years, then suddenly an earthquake comes, releasing the tension in the Earth's crust and establishing a new equilibrium.
Water remains liquid from one degree to 99. Then, at the hundredth degree, it turns into vapour, changing state and acquiring a new stability.
The mountain of sand built on the beach. You keep adding grains and everything proceeds with the mountain growing upwards. But the moment comes when, with just one grain too many, part of the slope collapses and takes on a new stable configuration. Stable for a while, until the next collapse.
The proverbial drop that makes the vessel overflow. You can keep adding drops until it is full. But the drop that makes it overflow does not merely cause a single drop of liquid to spill out — that last drop added at the end — but quite a few drops. There, in that last fateful drop, lies the cause of the tipping point, and the beginning of a new narrative unfolds. The last drop is the decisive one: it makes the vessel overflow, but it also allows you to escape the vessel in which you imagined you would have to remain for ever.
The English noun point, in Italian punto, has to do with the verb pungere, to prick. Before it is a place where two segments or two straight lines intersect, punto is, first and foremost, what “has been pricked”, the past participle of that verb.
The word tipping derives from the English verb to tip, meaning ‘to knock (something) down’, ‘to overturn’. It is a word of uncertain origin, perhaps derived from Scandinavian (compare the Swedish tippa, ‘to tip over’, ‘to dump’), or from a special use of ‘tip’. It can also be compared to tilt, ‘to fall’, ‘to overturn’. When we go into tilt, in fact, we find ourselves upside down, with nothing connecting us to the world, overturned from our habitual position.
Reaching the tipping point is rather like going into tilt, no longer being able to withstand the slope to which we had previously grown accustomed, and feeling the need to give the story a new course. And this story can, as always, be the story of the complex system or your own story, since you, after all, are a complex system.
References
This article is an extract from the fourth chapter of Enrico Cerni, Atlante della Complessità, Milano, Il Sole 24 Ore Editrice. https://www.amazon.it/Atlante-complessit%C3%A0-Leggere-navigare-presente/dp/B0FC4YCVXK/