>[!abstract] >"The adjacent possible is a term coined many years ago by one of my intellectual heroes, the complexity scientist Stuart Kauffman; it was the title of an opening chapter in my book Where Good Ideas Come From, and I’ve found over the years that people gravitate to the idea, even though at heart, it is a relatively simple concept. **In any system that is evolving over time—whether it’s a biological system or a cultural one—at any given point in that evolution, there are a finite set of ways that the system can be changed, and a much larger set of changes that can’t be made.** > >Think of the pieces of a chessboard halfway through a game of chess: there are a finite set of moves that are possible at that moment of the game, given the rules of chess, and a much larger set that can’t be made. The set of moves that you can make define the adjacent possible at that moment in the game. If you think of it in terms of technology, there’s simply no way to invent a microwave oven in 1650, however smart you might be. But somehow, in the middle of the 20th century, the idea of a microwave oven became imaginable, became part of the adjacent possible. > >As I wrote in Good Ideas, “The adjacent possible is a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself.” Each moment in our history unlocks new doors of adjacent possibilities. The trick is to figure out what they are exactly, and whether they’re leading us to beneficial places" ([[Johnson, n. d.]]). >[!related] >- **North** (upstream): — >- **West** (similar): [[Light cone]] >- **East** (different): — >- **South** (downstream): —