What about dancing landscapes? When living on Waddington’s warped plane, we are likely to feel that this plane is a dancing landscape. We encounter new balls flipping into our valley. It is a tipping point for us—the unpredictability of the ball entering our valley may be experienced as a dancing change in our life. Is the landscape actually dancing, or is it each of us who is dancing?
Are we actually the ball on the warped plane that is entering a new valley? Are we what is “tipping” over the top of the ridge? Everything changes when one is moving into an unanticipated valley and rolling in a new manner through this new valley. There are new realities and new viruses. As global citizens we feel confused and vulnerable—with considerable justification.
Each ridge is a point of decision, the ball can fall to one side or the other, which path it takes is extremely dependent on initial conditions. A very minor change can switch the path from one attractor – the hole, to a nearby one – missed! Once this bifurcation point has been passed it may take a very large perturbation (a hidden stone say) to switch attractors again, we say the system has become ‘locked’ into a particular attractor.
Personal Reflection on a Dancing Landscape
We would suggest that all of us living in mid-21st Century America (and perhaps anywhere else in the world) are living on a dancing landscape. One of us [JF] currently is plugging away at navigation on a warped plane of health care: he is giving talks at several medical schools and overseeing massive shifts in reproductive health care after roe v wade overturned recently. Because of the Supreme Court decision regarding abortion rights, members of the health care community in the USA are witnessing a surge in VUCA-Plus challenges. More importantly—every person living in the United States (and elsewhere in the world) is concerned for someone who might have an unwanted pregnancy at some point in life.
The following comments are offered regarding this health care challenge:
Imagine you are a medical student who wanted to do your training back home in Texas and now you find you will be hunted down like an outlaw if you help someone get an abortion or care for them in the Emergency department for complications of a home abortion. We have returned to pre-73 “illegal abortions”.
Some people in our land believe we can make people illegal and behaviors illegal and they will “go away”
That kind of thinking gets us into no end of trouble again and again and again. Didn’t we learn anything from prohibition?
We seem like fast creators and slow learners on many fronts.
I’ve found my ability to play around with complexity is not that common, so I find ways to provide visuals that seem to help.
