May 4, 2022

The Adjacent Possible

One of the concepts that keeps surfacing in my work, on the work computer and in the more offline corners of my life, is something called the “adjacent possible”. It traces back to Stuart Kauffman.¹

“It just may be the case that biospheres on average keep expanding into the adjacent possible. By doing so they increase the diversity of what can happen next. It may be that biospheres, as a secular trend, maximize the rate of exploration of the adjacent possible.”

Ah yes, the philosophical stuff.

The adjacent possible is actually two things in my work:

First, and most straightforwardly, it’s a map of the futures that may come to be. In other words, it’s the wide set of “possible” as represented in a standard a futures cone, but limited to what might happen next, after today. 

The future possibles, plausibles, and probables are all functions of the adjacent possible. Mapping the adjacencies is a powerful tool against which to strategize towards a preferable future. I connect the adjacent possible into my futuring work because I find that talking about adjacent possibles is often a bit easier for people who are not used to dealing with ambiguous and long-scale time horizons. Much like a game of chess, it takes years to develop the projected imagination to look dozens of moves ahead, but nearly everyone can, perhaps with a little help, think about the immediate next moves available to them. The adjacent possible then becomes a gentle on-ramp to further horizons.

But there’s another reason I pepper this concept into as much of my work as possible:

The adjacent possible is, in Kauffman’s description of it, a guiding principle of survival. In fact that’s the original context of the quote above, outlining hypothetical laws that describe how biospheres continue on into the future. Maximizing for the adjacent possible, the diversity of what can happen next, is the opposite to being backed into a corner or finding yourself on a dead-end path.

The adjacent possible, then, is something that we can and should maximize. I mentioned this briefly during the #criticalUX panel on wielding power².

When viewed through the lens of the adjacent possible, power is, at least in part, our ability to access and alter the set of adjacent possibles. Responsible power is then increasing the adjacent possibles for as many people as possible, thereby giving them the agency to move towards preferable futures for themselves.

Unlike the regret minimization framework and it’s cynical ilk, I find framing decisions around adjacent-possible maximization to be profoundly optimistic and hopeful without being untethered from reality. It’s also less individualistic, as adjacent possibles inherently include the entire system and all its participants. Minimizing regret may benefit you, maximizing adjacent possibles can benefit everyone.

Which brings us to a question I want to leave you with: in our current moment, what are our adjacent possibles? How can those of us with power (no matter how little it may seem) open up the adjacent possibles for others? What does the right to bodily autonomy and reproductive freedom look like through the lens of the adjacent possible? What adjacent possibles are at our disposal to protect those rights? How can we increase our adjacent possibles in which to further that fight?

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I’ve started musing on my own answers to these provocations over on Twitter (it’s a whole messy thread, apologies in advance):

Please engage! What adjacent possibles (preferable and otherwise) can you see? Where are you looking to maximize your own opportunities for action and other adjacent possibles?