The Adjacent Possible

Where do good ideas come from?

Not just good ideas but ‘breakthrough’ ideas..ideas that shape shift how we see the world

A cursory look at the history of innovation and cultural breakthroughs gives you the impression that breakthrough ideas are purely in the realm of the ‘genius’ and their thunderbolt-to-the-head Eureka moments. As a culture we love to romanticise these stories, usually giving the actual work it takes a snappy montage of someone furiously working out equations or pouring bubbling liquids into test tubes.

Steven Johnson in his book challenges this view, as he says “We have a natural tendency to romanticise breakthrough innovations, imagining momentous ideas transcending their surroundings…But ideas are works of bricolage…We take the ideas we’ve inherited or that we’ve stumbled across, and we jigger them together into some new shape.” Initially drawing on examples from evolution and nature he clarifies that when life gets creative, it gravitates to certain recurring patterns, whether those patterns are emergent and organising, or whether they are deliberately crafted by us humans

One of those patterns is the Adjacent Possible

The term adjacent possible was first described by American theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman in 2002. He proposed that biological systems are able to morph into more complex systems by making incremental, relatively less energy consuming changes in their makeup. Evolution really works by tasking available resources and cobbling them together to create new uses. From the basic molecules that dominated lifeless earth to transformations to more complex molecules. Those molecules then combined into amino acids, amino acids into proteins and proteins into DNA and DNA into complex life forms (I’m obviously skipping a few steps) like butterflies. The basic building blocks to get a butterfly were probably available on earth before life..but you couldn’t go from the primordial soup to a butterfly in one leap. Life needed to explore the adjacent possible and capitalise on those increment innovations

As Johnson says, think of the adjacent possible as a house that magically expands with each door you open. 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 and eventually you’ll have built a palace. What this tells us is that at any moment the world is capable of extraordinary change, but only certain changes can happen.

Incubate

In the 1870s, a French doctor, Stephane Tarnier was on a break and decided to walk through the Paris zoo. While there he chanced upon an exhibit for chicken incubators. Seeing those chicken hatchlings happily prance around in a warm enclosure..rather than an epiphany.. led Stephane to make an association. Could those work for human babies? He then hired the zoo’s poultry-raiser to build incubator boxes for premature newborns at his hospital. In the late 1800s infant mortality was tragically high by modern standards. What Stephane’s little hacked-together device did was halve the mortality rate of low-weight babies. Since then, following a familiar trajectory with any advanced technology as well as medicine, incubators are now a standard feature of any hospital and have contributed to a staggering decline in infant mortality.

However in developing countries the story is a bit more bleak. Infant mortality rates are still high. While incubators do help, they are expensive, costing tens of thousands of dollars. But the bigger hurdle to overcome is the power requirements and constant maintenance that these devices require. Timothy Pretero, an MIT professor, started to look at how the problem of the incubated could be solved. The solution had to be less expensive and given the developing world context a more reliable device. One that did not depend on specialised parts or trained technicians.

In lock-step with the ‘adjacent possible’ Prestero looked around for what was present, abundant and technically feasible. What he noticed was that even small towns in the developing world manage to keep automobiles in working order. This was the door he opened. He built an incubator out of automobile parts. It looked like a streamlined modern incubator, but its guts were automotive. Sealed-beam headlights supplied the crucial warmth; dashboard fans provided filtered air circulation; door chimes sounded alarms. You could power the device via an adapted cigarette lighter, or a standard-issue motorcycle battery. His team called it the Neonurture. Building the NeoNurture out of car parts was doubly efficient, because it tapped both the local supply of parts themselves and the local knowledge of automobile repair. You didn’t have to be a trained medical technician to fix the NeoNurture; you didn’t even have to read the manual. You just needed to know how to replace a broken headlight.

Good ideas are like the NeoNurture device. They are, inevitably, constrained by the parts and skills that surround them. And ‘constrained’ is the key word here. We have this notion that ideas are like the shiny $100,000 device straight from the factory. However breakthrough ideas and innovation lie in the detritus. They lie not in making giant leaps but steps within the bounds of the technological or cultural sphere we live in. Youtube is a great idea now. But it would have been a terrible idea in 1995. Because in 1995 a two minute video would have taken about an hour to download on a 14.4bps modem (the one with the screeches). Youtube in 1995 would have escaped the bounds of the adjacent possible of the early web. Webvan, one of the more spectacular crashes of the early 2000s dot com bust was guilty of just that i.e taking a leap into online retailing when most people didn’t completely trust the internet.

CONCLUSION

There is a brilliant scene in the movie Apollo 13. Astronauts in the lunar module on their way back are running out of oxygen, Mission Control on earth needs to hack together a carbon dioxide filter or the Astronauts will poison themselves with their own exhalations. They assemble a crack team of engineers and the lead engineer empties a bunch of random gear onto a conference table. He holds up a ‘carbon scrubber’ and declares “We gotta find a way to make this fit into a hole for this,” he says, and then points to the spare parts on the table, “using nothing but that.” The spare parts on the table represent what the astronauts in the lunar module have to work with and the adjacent possible of building a working filter. The device they eventually come up with works perfectly and the astronauts reach home safely. A happy Hollywood ending..only it really happened

This is the perfect analogy for coming up with good ideas. You work with what you have and then connect, fuse, recombine. Ideas then cross conceptual borders and reinvent themselves. But to do that you need to begin. Not in isolation with majestic thoughts. But with getting out there and chucking more spare parts on the table.

Rahul Soans is the Founder of The Disruptive Business Network where this was first published