Tipping points and what they mean for management

That old saying, ‘it’s the last straw that breaks the camel’s back’, is the perfect description of tipping points.

The camel is standing, patiently chewing the cud, eyeing its handler, burping, farting, and doing what camels do, while the caravan hustler loads it up and loads it up and loads it up. And then – the camel collapses and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men can’t put this mixed metaphor together again. Same with Humpty (to flog a dead metaphor). Sitting on the wall, rolling backward and forwards enjoying the view (or whatever it is eggs do on walls), and then – Humpty rolls just that little bit too far and they’re in the tipping zone and it’s all downhill and deconstructed omelettes from there on. Those are tipping points. Mixed metaphors aside, tipping points are serious business, which is why the University of Exeter and the Global Systems Institute put together this report on global tipping points.

The scary thing about tipping points is that the full damage caused by negative tipping points will be far greater than their initial impact, because they act a bit like dominoes. So, for example, each tip will have effects that cascade through biological, social, and economic systems on a global scale. It’s hard to predict how these will happen, but historic events, like the eruption of Tambora in Indonesia in 1813, displayed a series of cascading repercussions that would have been impossible to predict, so it’s not unreasonable to assume that tipping points will initiate processes that we can try to predict, but with very little certainty. The only thing we can be sure of is that they will be pretty dramatic, just like Tambora.

Tambora’s domino effect

The largest volcanic eruption in recorded history, Tambora exploded with a force that was 100,000 times as powerful as the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. But it wasn’t the explosion that was so dramatic, it was the cascading series of events that followed – some good, some bad, some pretty weird. The ensuing cloud of ash and stone blocked out the sun for more than a year, particularly in the northern hemisphere, making 1816 known as ‘the year without a summer’. Decreasing temperatures caused crop failures across the northern hemisphere, resulting in famine in Europe, increased westward migration (with its accompanying ecological destruction and genocide), unseasonal rains and floods in China, cholera in India, and drought in Brazil. It is speculated – with some good evidence – that Tambora was directly responsible for the invention of the bicycle and the founding of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons).

Unexpected repercussions

Seriously, the failure of Joseph Smith’s father’s farm in Vermont had the impressionable young man trekking south with his family to Palmyra, where the adverse weather conditions inspired a number of religious sects and – conveniently – Jesus, God and the angel Moroni flew down to earth to reveal to Joseph Smith the Golden Book on which the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is based.

Somewhat more prosaically, and certainly more usefully in the long run, German inventor Karl Drais put his mind to mitigating the transportation problems caused by the lack of horse feed. With nothing to feed them, and not much to feed people, horses were slaughtered for food, and people walked instead of riding or travelling by carriage. So Karl Drais created a two-wheeled human-powered vehicle – the precursor of the bicycle.

Tipping into the abyss

Tambora was a one-off that had repercussions that have echoed down over the last 200 years, but we basically recovered from it. And that’s because, while Tambora was ginormous, it was not global. And that’s the scary thing about the tipping points we’re facing now. There’s more than one, they’re interconnected, and they’re global. So, when one tips, another is likely to follow soon on its heels with its own cascading repercussions. And so on, and so on, and so on.

So what does this mean for management?

Let’s be honest, the majority of government leaders, aspirant government leaders, and business leaders are committed to a ‘business as usual’ approach with some minor concessions – or at least lip service – to sustainability. But business as usual isn’t going to cut it. We need a genuinely transformative change, which can only be achieved by implementing a series of positive tipping points that will result in a cascade of positive feedback loops. It’s been said many times that, if we were to dedicate the same level of human, financial and technological resources to combating climate change as we did to fighting World War II, we could halt global warming in a year, and reverse it in two (or figures to that effect – they’re guesstimates). What characterised the world wars (both the first and the second) was that governments made hard decisions like rationing food and fuel, ceasing all non-essential production, and focusing all productive capacity toward manufacturing whatever was necessary to win the war. But then, they did – literally – have a gun to their heads. What we need to realise now is that global climate change is a metaphorical but no less real ‘gun to the head’, and we need to respond accordingly.

To quote the University of Exeter study: ‘The existence of tipping points means that “business as usual” is now over. Rapid changes to nature and society are occurring, and more are coming. If we don’t revise our governance approach, these changes could overwhelm societies as the natural world rapidly comes apart. Alternatively, with emergency global action and appropriate governance, collective interventions could harness the power of positive tipping point opportunities, helping navigate toward a thriving sustainable future.’

The alternative is – quite honestly – too ghastly to contemplate. So, sadly, most of us just don’t.