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The Adjacent Possible

Dec 22, 2024 innovationemergencecreativity
Alexander Graham Bell's telephone patent drawing
Bell and Gray filed patents within hours of each other — February 14, 1876

Stuart Kauffman introduced the term in his 1993 book The Origins of Order. The adjacent possible is the set of all things one step away from what currently exists. Not everything is possible at every moment — only what’s adjacent to what we already have.

This explains why the same inventions appear simultaneously in different places.

On February 14, 1876, Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray filed telephone patents within hours of each other. Newton and Leibniz developed calculus independently in the 1670s, triggering history’s bitterest priority dispute. In June 1858, Darwin had completed two-thirds of On the Origin of Species when he received Wallace’s letter describing identical conclusions about natural selection.

William Ogburn and Dorothy Thomas documented 150 cases of multiple discovery in a 1922 paper. Robert Merton found 261 examples by 1961 — and noted that the study of multiple discovery was itself a multiple discovery.

You can’t invent the internet in 1850. The preconditions don’t exist. Packet switching requires digital computers. Digital computers require transistors. The adjacent possible hasn’t expanded far enough.

Ideas become “ripe” when enough foundational knowledge exists. German philosophers called this the zeitgeist — certain discoveries can only happen once the supporting knowledge has matured.

Each step into the adjacent possible expands its boundary. Every new idea, tool, or connection opens adjacencies that didn’t exist before.

You can reach further by moving one step at a time. You can’t leap across empty territory.

Go Deeper

Books

  • Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson — Popularizes Kauffman’s concept for general audiences. Liquid networks, slow hunches, serendipity.
  • The Origins of Order by Stuart Kauffman — The 1993 origin. Technical, aimed at biologists and complexity scientists.
  • At Home in the Universe by Stuart Kauffman — More accessible Kauffman on self-organization.

Essays

  • Steven Johnson’s Substack newsletter is literally called “Adjacent Possible” — ongoing exploration of the concept.

Related: [[multiple-discovery]], [[scenius]], [[zeitgeist]]