Hysteresis
I never got addicted to Magic: The Gathering. And after seeing a recent video by Tolarian Community College called Half Of Magic: The Gathering Will Not Be Magic: The Gathering 🔗, which lamented that cards featuring Marvel characters and Final Fantasy characters and Lord of the Rings characters and so on will gain equal prominence with cards that feature the characters that the game spent three decades building its reputation on, I can confidently say that I don’t plan on becoming addicted to Magic: The Gathering.
That video linked to an article by Gareth Edwards called Breaching the Trust Thermocline Is the Biggest Hidden Risk in Business 🔗. Edwards argues that businesses take customer trust for granted because they assume that breaches of trust are easily reversible; that if you lose 50,000 customers after a bad decision, you should be able to get those 50,000 customers back if you undo that one decision.
But the trust thermocline is non-linear. Nonlinear systems are those in which causes can happen far in advance of their effects, even when a direct relationship between them can be identified. This is why so many businesses miss the looming presence of a trust thermocline. In scientific terms, it’s a system of “hysteresis,” in which the current state of a system depends on the consumer’s cumulative history with that system as well as how they perceive their current relationship with it.
(Edwards defines “thermocline” in the article.)
Wikipedia defines “hysteresis” as 🔗:
the dependence of the state of a system on its history. For example, a magnet may have more than one possible magnetic moment in a given magnetic field, depending on how the field changed in the past.
Merriam-Webster gives the adjectival form 🔗 as “hysteretic”.
The Wikipedia page goes on to say that the word dervies from a Greek word meaning “lagging behind”, which is a mental visual that I like.
Upon being presented with this concept of a system that depends on its history, I strained my memory to try to recall the mathematical term for a system that does not depend on its history. I didn’t have to strain for too long, because it was listed in the See Also section of that same Wikipedia page: it’s called the Markov property 🔗.