Adjacent possible

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A concept coined by Stuart Kauffman that contemplates the path dependency of evolutionary or iterative processes — dynamic systems and the like — and which is at the same time obvious enough to go without saying (though it wasn't said until Kauffman coined it in in 1990s), but also surprisingly profound and counterintuitive, and challenging to the reductionist account of the world.

The “adjacent possible” is the as-yet unexplored territory made directly accessible, and explorable, by the existing state of knowledge (or system configuration). It us a limit on immediately available progress. But pushing into any adjacency ( by incrementally expanding the system in itself creates further adjacent possibilities. It is to observe that at any time and in any given state of knowledge, one can only develop into that adjacency. Possibilities beyond it by definition don’t exist yet.

So were Einstein to drop through a a portal in the space-time continuum and arrive at the Royal Academy in 1600 with his theory of special relativity, he would have been laughed out of court as it is predicated on so many intellectual and technological developments which did not yet exist. There's a path dependency, that is to say: you cannot “skip links” when you jump. The proposition that any intermediate state in the evolution of an organism must have served its own evolutionary purpose (for example prototypes of the eye - light-sensitive patches of skin, say, which could not see must still have had some use).

That much is obvious. However as we inevitably look at developments in hindsight it is easy to to diminish the intellectual significance of this. It is not just that one distant possibility depends on on a series of iterations through adjacent possibilities, but that the very possibility of those distant two possibilities is contingent on on arriving at the adjacencies.

A favourite example of mine is is the the Dewey decimal system. Until the digitisation of information it was impossible to imagine managing literature without an organising schema like the Dewey decimal system, and indeed how ow redundant and worthless a physical organising schema like the Dewey system would become.

Only once the digital revolution had happened did digitising text become a possibility adjacent to ordinary physical text, and only once that possibility had become an actuality did alternative means of sorting, categorising, and retrieving information themselves become part of the ajacent possible.

A common metaphor is an enormous palace to which you can only gain access by my opening and exploring each room, but I don't think that quite captured it, if you are not discovering but inventing and constructing the palace by opening its door. This is the profound difference between the reductionist disposition and the pragmatic 1. Reductionism holds that the universe is is a settled finite determinable thing and the job of science is one of Discovery; pragmatism says the job is one of of the invention and imagination.

The formal and the informal

Regard the formal part of any system or structure at any time as as those rooms in your hyper palace whose doors you have already opened, and whose territory you have already explored.

The adjacent possible is, by definition, informal. It is connections that have not yet been made; books that have not yet been written.

Your formal structure both facilitates and constrains it: the lifts, kitchens and water-coolers at which serendipitous encounters germinate ideas and frame opportunities; access-controlled departments, information barriers, silos, fiefdoms, which prevent the free-flow of information.

As with any system, design can therefore change the likelihood, nature and rate of innovation.

Pixar designed the architecture of its building to oblige people to walk past people they might not otherwise see. You could do it too,by calling a physical meeting, where people have no choice to be engaged, rather than s large online Skype gathering, where no one pays the blindest bit of attention.