In complexity science there is a notion of rugged and fixed landscapes. A fixed landscape can be seen as a mountain, where there is just a single peak. You can see a landscape as a graph for a fitness function. Peaks are where you have an optimum, and valleys are the opposite.
The landscape can either be a single peak, or it can be rugged with many peaks of different heights. Just imaging this. With a single peak landscape it is easy to see where the optimum is, it is at the point of the peak. If you can reach the peak you have found the optimum and you don’t have to look any further. If the landscape is rugged, however, there are a lot of peaks and it is harder to find the best optimum. When you stand on the peak and look at any direction there is a downward slope, hence you are on a peak. What you don’t know at that time is whether there is a higher peak ahead of you, if you just would walk down the slope and keep looking for peaks. You might be worse off or you might be better off.
Now consider that you know that you are in a rugged landscape and you found your peak and you are the best profitable business in your market. You might be the best in your market (landscape) right now, but you don’t know for sure since you have reached your peak and are not looking any further. Imaging now that another company is developing a disruptive alternative solution. What will happen is that the new company will reach another peak and your company will end up in an alley. You were at a peak and now you lost it. This is called dancing landscapes. In complex systems landscapes are dancing, everything is in constant motion. If your business survives depends on how you handle the change. This is where agile comes into play. Short deliveries and always changing according to the market makes you less vulnerable when the market moves.
So didn’t Trump realize this? That he thought he was in a fixed landscape but in fact it was dancing? When looking at the stock market, US economy and the unemployment rate it all seem as he was going to be reelected, and he probably would have been. But when the pandemic hit the US, unemployment rates started to rise again the landscape changed, the reality changed, the world changed. He was now out of his competence and didn’t listen to experts, and then the opinion changed. Maybe he lost the election due to his un-ability to adjust to change.
We can make another example just for the sake of it. It wasn’t just because of the dancing landscape, he might not have understood that he was in a Complex domain, maybe if he just would have listened to experts.