Both in a podcast and a recent article, I came across the phrase “the adjacent possible” and being curious, I looked into it more. According to the scientist Stuart Kauffman, the adjacent possible describes the potential of what could be when we combine what we know currently with what is just beyond our immediate knowledge and in the process move toward a higher level of complexity. The writer Steven Johnson discusses the adjacent possible as “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.”
If you think about it, you realize we know this intuitively. How many times as children do we play on the floor with a variety of toys, put them together, and create something completely new? (Isn’t this a major theme in the Toy Story movies?) Whatever it is we’re making, we’re not devising it entirely out of the ether: we’re taking what we have, looking beyond its apparent possibility, and stretching its limits to the point that we have made something more complicated and potentially more sophisticated.
However, this view of slow, methodical invention where one thing builds on the next or combines with something else does not always correspond with the way we portray genius or creativity. We propagate an image of the lone inventor in his/her lab, slaving away on his/her own, and voila!, creating the next great thing. We look at inspiration as revolutionary rather than as evolutionary, and as a result, we may discourage those who are on the precipice of discovery.
I wonder if we teach students the power and the excitement of the adjacent possible in our schools and in their lives. Children are fully aware of this process of change in their own world, possibly more than ever as they use the web to mix and match and create cultural hybrids. They have no trouble taking the music to which the listen or the movies they watch, combining them with other media, and inventing something entirely new. While youth may have always done this, the ability to merge a variety of formats and produce something different and more complex may be more present than ever.
Is our fear of plagiarism and the failure of our laws to keep up with the changes in the marketplace of ideas preventing us from maximizing this form of creativity? Are we demonstrating to our students that this process of creativity is in fact how the greatest scientists and artists have functioned forever?
In addition, are we shortchanging our students and preventing them from meeting their own adjacent possibilities? We should be helping them see that they are always on the edge of something completely new, something completely different, and something very exciting and more complex. This is what schools can and should do, and we should celebrate the adjacent possible all around us.
To read more about this, check out Steven Johnson’s recent article,
ttp://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703989304575503730101860838.html?mod=WSJ_hp_mostpop_read#printMode
