Building Moonshots

WAY 20Look to Tipping Points: Using tomorrow's standards today can help a team to prioritize milestones.

About the Way

A tipping point describes the moment of no return, when small changes become significant enough that they cause a larger unstoppable effect. It can also describe when a new technology becomes mainstream. For example, history shows that once energy ownership hits 5%, mass adoption is swift. After Edison's light bulb invention in 1879, although it took over a quarter century for electricity to reach the first 5% of US households, the entire country was quickly connected by 1950. A similar pattern of gradual into sudden adoption has occurred in terms of clean energy adoption for wind, solar, and other nonpolluting sources. By 2022, the world has reached 5% of adoption, totaling 87 countries, which energy experts see as the tipping point for switching to renewables.¹

Lifted from physics, the term tipping point was first used in the 1960s by a political science professor. The term is now used widely to describe critical moments from climate change to business, further popularized by journalist Malcolm Gladwell in his 2000 bestselling book The Tipping Point, which largely describes social epidemics and how ideas catch on fire. Tipping points can also be called critical mass, critical events, inflection points, boiling points, thresholds, or nonlinear instabilities. Although tipping points can feel sudden in the moment, the pattern leading up to the change becomes ...