About - Adjacent Possible
adjacentpossible.substack.com
About - Adjacent Possible
“Innovative environments are better at helping their inhabitants explore the adjacent possible, because they expose a wide and diverse sample of spare parts - mechanical or conceptual - and they encourage novel ways of recombining those parts.
-from “Where Good Ideas Come From” by Steven Johnson
A new idea is a network of cells exploring the adjacent possible of connections that they can make in your mind.
-Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From
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.
Cal Newport • So Good They Can't Ignore You
A yearning for innovation requires real exploration. It requires a persistent search to try (and fail) to move your understanding forward with a new tool, a new technique, a new insight. Sadly, the first innovation often isn’t even all that helpful, but may well provide a path to ones that are. This is an idea that Steven Johnson of Where Good Idea... See more
SAM H INKIE 3 6 0 1 S O U T H B R O A D S T R E E T
Without curiosity, the space of the adjacent possible would exist but remain unplumbed and inactive. Curiosity then opens up adjacent possibilities, whether that means new nodes and edges or the reformulation of existing nodes and edges (and ultimately of the network itself).
Perry Zurn, Dani S. Bassett • Curiosity and Networks of Possibility
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
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