What’s your next adjacent possible?
Part of what I explore with Sustainable Ambition is rethinking traditional beliefs and conventions of success and ambition so we can thrive in life and work.
And one of the conventions I push against is thinking that we must know our path and can’t waiver. That we aren’t supposed to have our ambitions shift or change, or have our level of ambition ebb and flow.
I believe it’s the exact opposite—that we should expect change, that something is likely wrong if our ambitions don’t evolve. Our paths aren’t fixed. We can make it up as we go along.
One of the reasons I believe this is rooted in the concept of the adjacent possible. I first learned of this concept reading one of my favorite books, Where Good Ideas Come From, by Steven Johnson. His Substack newsletter uses this concept as its name, and he writes about it explaining:
"The adjacent possible is a term coined many years ago by one of my intellectual heroes, the complexity scientist Stuart Kauffman… In any system that is evolving over time—whether it’s a biological system or a cultural one—at any given point in that evolution, there are a finite set of ways that the system can be changed, and a much larger set of changes that can’t be made. Think of the pieces of a chessboard halfway through a game of chess: there are a finite set of moves that are possible at that moment of the game, given the rules of chess, and a much larger set that can’t be made. The set of moves that you can make define the adjacent possible at that moment in the game. If you think of it in terms of technology, there’s simply no way to invent a microwave oven in 1650, however smart you might be. But somehow, in the middle of the 20th century, the idea of a microwave oven became imaginable, became part of the adjacent possible.”
He goes on:
"As I wrote in Good Ideas, ‘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.’ Each moment in our history unlocks new doors of adjacent possibilities. The trick is to figure out what they are exactly, and whether they’re leading us to beneficial places.”
While this is related to science, we are part of biological and cultural systems, too. The way that I apply this concept is to think that we only have a certain set of possible futures that are plausible to us at this moment in time. Even further out futures aren’t possible to foresee until we have more experiences, until we evolve more. From where we stand today, we can’t fully see our path to the end or see all the possibilities we may have in front of us in the future. Similarly, five years ago, we couldn’t have seen what’s possible for us today.
This is one of the reasons why we end up wanting to change or shift or allow ourselves to dial down our level of ambition.
It’s why we shouldn’t kick ourselves thinking we were on the wrong path when we realize we want to step onto another at this time.
We are now just seeing our new adjacent possible.
This is what’s happening when we’re navigating inflection points, moments of change and transition.
It’s what happens when we enter a liminal space. We step into making it up as we go along.
We’re evolving. We’re exploring what is in now our adjacent possible. When framed this way, I find it more exciting and more adventurous. What is our shadow future? What is our map of the ways we can reinvent ourselves?
It's something fun to ponder!
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