About - Adjacent Possible

Exploring the adjacent possible can be as simple as opening a door. But sometimes you need to move a wall.

Where Good Ideas Come From, which I introduced in Rule #4 when talking about his notion of the adjacent possible. According to Johnson, access to new ideas and to the “liquid networks” that facilitate their mixing and matching often provides the catalyst for breakthrough new ideas.

If we want to understand where good ideas come from, we have to put them in context.

When nature finds itself in need of new ideas, it strives to connect, not protect.

If knowledge is a network and curiosity is its growth principle, and if the adjacent possible is indeed hovering over the edges of knowledge systems as they currently exist, then curiosity is at least one of, if not the primary, epistemic access point to that field of adjacent epistemic possibilities. Crucially, that field of adjacent epistemic pos

Good ideas may not want to be free, but they do want to connect, fuse, recombine. They want to reinvent themselves by crossing conceptual borders. They want to complete each other as much as they want to compete.

You begin in a room with four doors, each leading to a new room that you haven’t visited yet. Those four rooms are the adjacent possible. But once you open one of those doors and stroll into that room, three new doors appear, each leading to a brand-new room that you couldn’t have reached from your original starting point. Keep opening new doors an