In his annual letter to Amazon shareholders, Jeff Bezos says,
“One area where I think we are especially distinctive is failure. I believe we are the best place in the world to fail (we have plenty of practice!), and failure and invention are inseparable twins. To invent you have to experiment, and if you know in advance that it’s going to work, it’s not an experiment.
Most large organizations embrace the idea of invention, but are not willing to suffer the string of failed experiments necessary to get there. Outsized returns often come from betting against conventional wisdom, and conventional wisdom is usually right.”
There aren't too many leaders and organizations that are willing to forego certainty long enough to find new questions, which in turn means thinking long-term. Letter writing is the one habit that has a way of making us think.
But, paraphrasing Andre Gide, going the distance to discover new oceans is about having the courage to lose sight of the shore.
Thinking about thinking
In Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation Steven Johnson says that one of the ways to find big ideas is to get beyond the first ideas we have, to explore what he calls the “adjacent possible,” borrowing the suggestive name coined by scientist Stuart Kauffman to describe the set of all first-order combinations.
The expression captures both the limits and the creative potential of change and innovation.
Johnson says:
The adjacent possible is a kind of shadow future, hovering at the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself.
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The strange and beautiful truth about the adjacent possible is that its boundaries grow as you explore them. Each new combination opens up the possibility of other new combinations. Think of it 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. 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.
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What the adjacent possible tells us is that at any moment the world is capable of extraordinary change, but only certain changes can happen.
The “adjacent possible” is about the network of minds that can potentially engage with a problem. An example to illustrates this point comes from Apollo 13 space mission:
There is a famous moment in the story of the near-catastrophic Apollo 13 mission—wonderfully captured in the Ron Howard film—in which the mission control engineers realize they need to create an improvised carbon dioxide filter, or the astronauts will poison the lunar module atmosphere with their own exhalations before they return to Earth. The astronauts have plenty of carbon “scrubbers” onboard, but these filters were designed for the original, damaged spacecraft and don't fit the ventilation system of the lunar module they are using as a lifeboat to return home. Mission control quickly assembles a “tiger team” of engineers to hack their way through the problem.
In the movie, Deke Slayton, head of flight crew operations, tosses a jumbled pile of gear on a conference table: hoses, canisters, stowage bags, duct tape and other assorted gadgets. He holds up the carbon scrubbers. “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 space gear on the table defines the adjacent possible for the problem of building a working carbon scrubber on a lunar module. (The device they eventually concocted, dubbed the “mailbox,” performed beautifully.)
The trick is to get more parts on the table.
But to learn to explore the edges of what is possible necessitates that we learn to tolerate uncertainty, that we create habits in how we seek and store information new and old, then work on building the steps that will make the whole vision come to life.
We explore the adjacent possible in innovative environments, where we are exposed to a variety of stimuli from things and ideas.