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Adjacent possible: Difference between revisions
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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. | 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. | |||