>[!abstract] >The adjacent possible is a concept from complexity theory and evolutionary biology (popularized by Stuart Kauffman and later Steven Johnson) describing the set of all possible new configurations, innovations, or states that become available given the current state of a system. Its key traits are: > >1. **Not all possibilities are reachable at once.** At any moment, only certain new states are accessible (the ones “adjacent” to the current configuration). For example, in biology, life couldn’t evolve wings before it had limbs; in technology, smartphones were only possible after portable computing, miniaturized components, and wireless networks existed. > >2. **The space expands as you explore it.** Every time you step into a new possibility, it opens up its own adjacent possibilities, like walking into a new room gives you access to doors you couldn’t reach before. > >3. **It's how innovation and complexity happen.** Innovation often consists in incremental changes at the edge of what's possible, rather than leaps into the unknown. >[!quote] >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]], [[Markov chain]] >- **East** (different): [[Path dependence]] >- **South** (downstream): [[Diffusion of innovations]]