The Upside of Uncertainty

Chapter 4

Adjacent Possible

While frontiers are about expanding the current boundaries of your life, the adjacent possible is about the untapped opportunities nearby, ready to be discovered. Author Steven Johnson calls it “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.”1 Biologist Stuart Kauffman introduced the term to describe how evolutionary adaptations often find surprising new uses, such as how feathers, evolved for warmth, turned out to be useful for flying or how the complex jawbones of fish, no longer useful on land, proved useful for hearing. But Kauffman has since applied the term to underscore that although we may perceive a finite world, ...