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, there are actually infinite possibilities hidden in the world around us. His favorite example is the screwdriver. Most of us see a single use, but in fact there are infinite ways it can be used! It can turn screws, wedge a door, be used in sculpture, be rented for spearfishing in exchange for 5 percent of the profits, and on and on.2

How do we tap into this expansive field of opportunity hovering just out of sight? First, we start by paying greater attention. In the nineteenth century, surgeon Joseph Lister noted something curious: carbolic acid that was used to treat the sewage spread on fields reduced the number of parasites in the cattle grazing there. He wondered if carbolic acid could also decrease the amount of bacteria in wounds after surgery. He experimented and discovered that using antiseptics reduced mortality rates after major operations from 40 percent to less than 3 percent by 1910, saving as many lives as were lost in all the wars of the nineteenth century.3

Adjacent possibles also reveal themselves when we look thoughtfully at problems we face. When Barbara Alink and her aging mother passed a group of elderly people sitting in wheelchairs, Alink’s mother announced, “Over my dead body will I ever use one of those.” Baffled by her mother’s statement, Alink realized, as she put it, “we live in a society that has caused a divide between people with and without disabilities…. Mobility devices emphasize the disability.”4 Alink is quick to clarify that wheelchairs are “amazing” for people who need them, but 60 percent of wheelchair users still have some use of their legs, and she wanted to make a device that gave greater freedom for that 60 percent.

Alink set about designing a device “so cool that it overcomes the discomfort other people have with the disability.”5 Using available bicycle parts, she designed the Alinker, which has a tricycle-like frame that allows users to remain at eye level, get around using their feet, and keep their hands free. The device required years of prototyping and she funded multiple iterations on personal credit cards, but in the end, she succeeded in creating a device that allows users to engage with others at face level while also giving them greater mobility. Alinker users can’t express enough gratitude. For ten-year-old Luca, who required 24/7 care and was always lying on his side, the Alinker has given him his childhood back: snacking from the countertop, being excited about school, engaging with friends, and even learning to swing a cricket bat.

Adjacent possibles also reveal themselves when we question assumptions. Vicki Saunders, a successful executive, recalls discovering this as a young woman living in Europe when the Berlin Wall came down. She jumped on a train to Prague, where “every sentence was, ‘Now that I’m free, I’m going to do this. Now that I’m free, I’m going to do that.’ Every person was dreaming … it was absolutely intoxicating.” Amid the elation, Saunders suddenly thought, Oh my god! I’m free too! What am I going to do? When she reframed her own situation, it allowed her to “recreate myself,” helping her see new and bolder options. “I ended up staying for four years, and it completely changed my life,” she concludes.6

After a career in Silicon Valley, including taking a company public, Saunders started to question assumptions again. She began to wonder why for her it “felt like a burden to be a woman in business. It felt like a burden to be a woman in society.” One day she realized, “I’m not surprised it is hard … because nothing was designed by [women]…. We were not at the table to design this world.” Only 4 percent of venture capital money goes to women founders, and five men hold as much wealth as 3.5 billion people. “How do you solve this?” Saunders asked. “Where are the acupuncture points in the system where you could create disruption so you could open up everything? For me, it was three: finance, education, and media. We need to fund women’s ideas.”7

Inspired by the Native peoples of the United States and Canada, whose wealth was demonstrated by how much they gave away, Saunders began to experiment with “radical generosity.” She founded SheEO, a perpetual investment fund where women give $1,100 to become “activators,” loaning to female entrepreneurs at a 0 percent interest rate. This fund is built on “the sanity of women looking at something, saying, ‘That makes sense to me. It is doing good in the world. I’d like to support it,’” Saunders explains. “Fifty percent of the population have had innovations sitting on the sidelines for generations. We have ideas on how to change things, and we haven’t been able to get funded.” Curious about the kinds of projects SheEO funds? It funded the Alinker!

Adjacent possibles reveal themselves, too, when we purposefully recombine things. Van Phillips enrolled in medical school because he was curious about creating a better prosthetic after losing a leg in a boating accident. His professors discouraged him, claiming all the prosthetic advancements had already been made. But Phillips argued that while existing prosthetics looked like a leg, they didn’t function like one. More interested in function than form, he borrowed principles from diving boards, pole vaults, and cheetahs to create the Flex-Foot, a carbon fiber prosthetic that works like a leg. It works like a spring to help wearers move in ways—including running and jumping—that other prostheses don’t. It has even been used in professional athletic competitions.

Adjacent possibles can also reveal themselves when we ask what’s missing. Designer Adrien Gardère is famous for the Melampo Lamp, for which he borrowed the folding mechanism of an Opinel knife to create two positions—straight down for diffuse indirect light or inclined for direct light. Today he designs spaces like the Louvre-Lens museum in France and the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. Recently he was asked to reimagine Chinese-French artist Huang Yong Ping’s installation in Paris’s Grand Palais, which featured a dragon’s silver skeleton wrapping around shipping containers. The exhibit, a commentary on China and global commerce, was well received, and the group supporting the exhibit made five to-scale models to recoup some of the exhibit’s cost. When none sold, they asked Gardère to explore why. He observed the model and noticed something critical was missing: the model did not capture the play of light and shadow through the glass ceiling of the Grand Palais. Gardère set about designing a projector system that recreated the light of the Parisian sun as it passed over the windows of the historic building. The results were stunning, and the five models quickly sold.8

Sometimes adjacent possibles reveal themselves if we’re facing a tempting but risky choice, when we ask what the worst-case scenario is. Steve Blank, the serial entrepreneur and father of the Lean Startup movement, started his career as an engineer. He recounts visiting Silicon Valley for a work assignment and being shocked upon opening the Mercury News to find page upon page of job listings. Blank decided right then to quit his job and stay. His colleague thought he was insane—back home, positions were scarce. But Blank asked himself, “What’s the worst that could happen? I knew that in this country I wouldn’t starve, so why not try?”9 Reframing the choice this way, Blank saw a viable adjacent possible, which gave him the courage to face one of life’s scariest uncertainties—joblessness—and ultimately enabled a much more dynamic career than if he had stayed with what was comfortable and certain.

Finally, adjacent possibles reveal themselves by questioning the status quo, like where we can live, how much we need to earn, or our definition of a good life. Lynne Curran, a tapestry artist featured in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy, and David Swift, an artist and educator who has worked with refugees and people with mental illnesses, are a creative couple who challenge norms. Rich in life but poor in resources, they bought an old house in Edinburgh, Scotland, so decrepit that the assessor suggested they demolish it. Instead, they transformed it into a gem regularly featured in design magazines with a gorgeous garden. But when a correctional facility opened next door, young men out on “good behavior” started breaking in, lighting cars on fire, and throwing stones through the windows.

The anxiety interrupting their work demanded a change. Unable to afford anything with any potential remotely close to Edinburgh, they at first searched the suburbs, but then asked: Why stay here? They considered Japan but settled on Tuscany, a place they had visited before and loved, and where they found an ancient farmhouse in Chiusi della Verna, the mystical mountainside of Michelangelo’s youth, just down the hill from where Saint Francis of Assisi experienced his stigmata. They moved in, again after significant renovations, and now can wake in the morning to see the mist clinging to the hills, walk past the rock Michelangelo painted into The Creation of Adam in the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling, and take fresh water from the springs that cover the mountainside.

Like frontiers, adjacent possibles require a willingness to look for them and the courage to pursue them. Moreover, they build on each other, in that each step you take into the unknown reveals yet more adjacent possibles in the future. Using the metaphor of a house, you can’t walk straight from the entrance to the tenth room. Rather, you reach new rooms by walking through each room successively, with each new room revealing new doors or new possibilities. Thus, while possibilities are infinite, we have to move forward to reveal the full range available to us. As Steven Johnson describes it, adjacent possibles are “intelligently curtailed at every step by the limitations of the present.”10

This may be no better illustrated than by the life of Buckminster Fuller, who suffered a series of defeats that left him contemplating taking his own life. After getting kicked out of Harvard twice, he married and then cofounded a company, only to be pushed out of that same company a few years later after losing his three-year-old daughter to spinal meningitis. With no job prospects and a second baby on the way, he wandered the streets of Chicago, thinking of drowning himself so his family could at least collect the life insurance payments. Then, in an inspirational flash, he considered a shadowy “what if”—an adjacent possible he described in almost religious terms. Rather than giving in to despair and despite his powerless position, what if he tried his best to simply change the world for the better. From that starting conviction, Fuller went on to write more than thirty books, register more than two dozen patents, invent the geodesic dome, and influence tens of thousands as a thought leader for reinventing the future.

The year he died, Fuller continued to describe himself in the humblest of terms as “guinea pig B,” summarizing his life by saying,

As you consider the potential of adjacent possibles in your own life, recall Fuller’s injunction, “We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims.”12