What is the Adjacent Possible?

In an interview for The Guardian, Steven Johnson describes his notion of the “adjacent possible” as a vision of cultural history in which innovation develops as a collective process, like “one door leading to another,  exploring the palace one room at a time.”

“Think of playing chess,” the article continues, “at any point in the game, several ingenious moves may be possible, but countless others won’t be. Likewise with inventions: the printing press was only possible – and perhaps only thinkable – once moveable type, paper and ink all existed. YouTube, when it was launched in 2005, was a brilliant idea; had it been launched in 1995, before broadband and cheap video cameras were widespread, it would have been a terrible one. Or take culture: to 1950s viewers, Johnson argues, complex TV shows such as Lost or The Wire would have been borderline incomprehensible, like some kind of avant-garde art, because certain ways of engaging with the medium hadn’t yet been learned. And all this applies, too, to the most basic innovation: life itself. At some point, back in the primordial soup, a bunch of fatty acids gave rise to a cell membrane, which made possible the simplest organisms, and so on. What those acids couldn’t do was spontaneously form into a fish, or a mouse: It wasn’t part of their adjacent possible.”

Maybe I will write more on the topic.  For now, I just highly recommend both the article and Johnson’s book.  

Also check out the articles in Wired and The Wall Street Journal, as well as the TED Talk: 

Any comments?  Thoughts?  I’d love to hear them!