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.
Interpretation
The adjacent possible refers to future possibilities that arise from the current state, allowing for transformation and innovation.
In this quote, Steven Johnson describes the concept of the 'adjacent possible' as the potential futures that exist just beyond our current reality, suggesting that innovation and change are always within reach if we are willing to explore the opportunities that emerge from our present circumstances. It highlights the importance of imagination and creativity in reinventing ourselves and our world, as every current situation holds the seeds for new possibilities.
In practice
During a presentation on innovation strategies, one could quote this to illustrate how businesses can explore new markets.
How could so many intelligent people be so grievously wrong for such an extended period of time? How could they ignore so much overwhelming evidence that contradicted their most basic theories? These questions, too, deserve their own discipline: the sociology of error.
Most new movements start this way: hundreds or thousands of individuals and groups, working in different fields and different locations, start thinking about change using a common language, without necessarily recognizing those shared values. You just start following your own vector, propelled along by people in your immediate vicinity. And then one day, you look up and realize that all those individual trajectories have turned into a wave.
Organizations that empower folks further down the chain or try to get rid of the big hierarchal chains and allow decision making to happen on a more local level end up being more adaptive and resilient because there are more minds involved in the problem.
What you end up seeing when you look at history is that people who have been good at pushing the boundaries of possibility, and exploring those frontiers of good ideas and innovations, have rarely done it in moments of great inspiration. They don't just have a brilliant breakthrough idea out of nowhere and leap ahead of everyone else.
For decades, we've worked under the assumption that mass culture follows a steadily declining path toward lowest-common-denominator standards, presumably because the 'masses' want dumb, simple pleasures and big media companies want to give the masses what they want.
We are strangely biased, as individuals and media institutions, to focus on big sudden changes, whether good or bad - amazing breakthroughs, such as a new gadget that gets released, or catastrophic failures, like a plane crash.
For a short time we lived quietly. But this could not last. White men had found gold in the mountains around the land of winding water.
It is time for me to chuck in the sponge. To retire from films and stage. The heart for it has gone out of me: it won't come back.
I thank God that I've lived long enough to see what I have seen, and I pray that people will continue to do better. We are doing better, it may not seem so, but there was a time when people were lynched in the middle of the street and it was not against the law. We are doing better, but we have so much more to do.
I think that when you emigrate, when everything you took for granted disappears, it's a kind of loss of innocence. When you're a kid, the world as you know it is just there. Suddenly, you emigrate and that's no longer the case. It's a break in reality that parachutes you into adulthood.
Everything will change when your desire to move on exceeds your desire to hold on.
I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones.
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