The Adjacent Possible: How to Achieve Things Unimaginable in Advance?

In the previous discussion, we explored how contingency solidifies into destiny—that is, symmetry breaking—and how doors close. This might sound a bit disheartening. However, even as time passes, in certain situations, doors you never anticipated will open for you. In this discussion, we will explore how these doors open.

Imagine a teenager who once dreamed of becoming a writer. But at 17, his father told him writers would starve, so he had no choice but to switch to engineering and science.

At 18, he was fortunate to get an opportunity to study in the US and might have considered becoming a scientist. However, at 24, he failed two Ph.D. qualifying exams at MIT, felt deeply frustrated, and decided to abandon his academic career to pursue job opportunities. He received two job offers: Ford Motor Company at $479 a month, and an electronics company called Sylvania at $480 a month. He wanted to go to Ford and called to ask for just $1 more, but was rejected. Ultimately, he chose Sylvania [1].

As you can see, his dream of becoming a writer went unfulfilled, his path to becoming a scientist was blocked, and he didn’t even get into a renowned major company, ending up at a relatively unknown smaller firm. It’s often said that most major life decisions are settled before the age of thirty. This looks like the career trajectory of an ordinarily competent student, doesn’t it? Perhaps decades later, he would retire uneventfully, his life then set in stone.

However, this person was Morris Chang. It was just that at the time, he could not yet foresee that he would become the world-renowned Morris Chang.

Morris Chang moved to Texas Instruments in 1958 [1]—and coincidentally, in the same year, Jack Kilby invented the world’s first functional integrated circuit at Texas Instruments [2]. Chang demonstrated exceptional managerial talent, rising through the ranks from a production line engineer to eventually become Senior Vice President overseeing global semiconductor operations, holding the company’s third-highest position [3].

However, the story took a sharp turn: entering the 1970s, Texas Instruments bet heavily on consumer electronics like calculators and digital watches; Chang disagreed with this direction, but as a result, he was gradually marginalized and moved away from the center of power. At 52, Chang resigned, and his next company, which he joined, also ended unhappily after only about a year [3].

Clearly, Morris Chang was a manager with profound insights. Yet, after thirty years of striving in the American workplace, he never became the top leader of any company. At over fifty years old, what future could he still have?

At 54, he moved to Taiwan to become the President of the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI). He had hoped to implement reforms, but lacking a strong foundation, the reforms struggled to gain traction and failed to win widespread support, pleasing no one. By conventional wisdom, people in this age group typically choose to transition peacefully for a few years until retirement [3].

Yet, at 55, Morris Chang founded TSMC… and the rest, as they say, is history, leading to brilliant achievements [4].

Morris Chang stated in his autobiography: “If I were to choose my golden age, I would unhesitatingly choose those two and a half decades from sixty to eighty-five” [3].

To enter one’s golden age at 60 and have it last for 25 years—who could have imagined such a thing? People often say, “be yourself,” seek true passion, and achieve self-worth—yet, at 17, Morris Chang thought his true self lay in becoming a writer; at 52, he never anticipated that the most important endeavor of his life had not yet begun. The industry model of “dedicated wafer foundry” did not even exist at the time…

It was an industry he later pioneered.

Understanding such a life purely from an individual perspective is far from sufficient. It cannot be fully explained by individual effort or talent alone. We must examine a larger question: How exactly does the emergence of a career, a species, or any new phenomenon occur?

The conceptual tool for this discussion is called “the adjacent possible.”

What is “The Adjacent Possible”? #

“The adjacent possible” is a concept proposed and developed by theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman. Kauffman, a senior scholar at the Santa Fe Institute, a cornerstone in the field of complexity science, systematically articulated this concept in his 2000 book, Investigations [5].

Kauffman states: Any system, at any given moment, is surrounded by a series of new states that are “just one step away from being realized”—that is, states that can be reached by combining existing components or making a single modification. This series of states constitutes the system’s “adjacent possible” at that moment.

The origin of life, for instance, evolved incrementally by continuously transforming the “adjacent possible” into reality: In the primordial “chemical soup” of Earth, there was initially no room for DNA; only simple molecules existed. However, simple molecules could combine to form slightly more complex molecules, and the appearance of each new molecule enabled a host of previously impossible chemical reactions…

Thus, the boundaries of possibility continuously expand outward with each realization of a prior “possible.”

In 2010, science writer Steven Johnson vividly explained the concept of “the adjacent possible” to the general public using an analogy in his book Where Good Ideas Come From [6]: You are in a magical house, you open one door and step into a new room—and on the walls of this new room, several new doors will appear that you couldn’t have seen in the previous room.

In my view, the core of “the adjacent possible” theory shifts the perspective of innovation from “human-centric” to “possibility-centric”—

The key is not the individual’s intelligence level; you must first realize one possibility before new possibilities can open up. You must first enter that room to discover and open that new door.

“Concurrent” Discoveries: Not Coincidence #

The theory of “the adjacent possible” can immediately explain a long-standing puzzle in the history of science: why major inventions often exhibit concurrent discoveries.

Newton and Leibniz independently invented calculus, Darwin and Wallace almost simultaneously proposed the theory of natural selection, and Bell and Gray even filed patent applications for the telephone on the same day, February 14, 1876. In 1961, Columbia University sociologist Robert K. Merton, through a systematic examination of scientific history, arrived at a thought-provoking conclusion: multiple individuals independently making the same major discovery almost simultaneously is not an exception but a regularity in scientific discovery [7].

If inspiration were truly a stroke of genius in the minds of brilliant individuals, how could it coincidentally descend upon two geniuses at the same time?

If we simply view innovation as opening one door after another, everything becomes clear: Everyone lives in the same house, and the new door at the end of the corridor grows out of the “house” itself—is it not perfectly natural, then, that those individuals happened to be standing at that door at the same time and discovered it simultaneously?

In 2009, Santa Fe Institute economist W. Brian Arthur extended this logic to all technological domains and named it “combinatorial evolution”: New technologies are all combinations of existing technologies, and once a new technology is born, it immediately becomes a “component” for the next new technology—Therefore, the larger the toolbox, the faster new tools can be created, which is precisely the fundamental reason for accelerated technological development [8].

Even the fate of nations is similar. In 2007, physicist César Hidalgo and Harvard economist Ricardo Hausmann, among others, published their “product space” research in Science magazine: They mapped global trade as a network, and they found that national industrial upgrading usually does not occur as a sudden leap but rather by first developing products “adjacent” to existing capabilities, and then expanding to the next domain based on these—taking China as an example, its development, from textiles and apparel, and home appliance manufacturing, to mobile phones, electronic components, and new energy vehicle industries, has also expanded step by step along its “adjacent capabilities” [9].

Thus, conspiracy theories such as “the US used alien technology to build the iPhone” fall apart on their own. Because if it were alien technology, you wouldn’t be able to find its evolutionary map! The reality is that every new technology is realized incrementally along a series of “adjacent possibles.”

There’s no such thing as a “miracle from heaven” in this world. We merely arrive at a certain “room” before we can open the next “door.”

“One Step at a Time”: Inspiration from the Adjacent Possible #

Several cognitive tools previously introduced in this course have an intrinsic connection with “the adjacent possible”—

• Effectuation emphasizes that entrepreneurship isn’t about setting a product first and then seeking resources, but rather about first assessing the resources one possesses and then considering what possibilities these resources can combine to create;

• State Leverage suggests that when completing any task, one should not stop at the current achievement but instead reserve ample potential for the next stage of development;

• Capability-Seeking Theorem posits that the optimal strategy is not merely to pursue short-term returns but to choose directions that open up more possibilities for the next step.

While these tools offer different perspectives, they all embody the essence of “taking one step at a time”—However, the deeper and more radical implication of “the adjacent possible” theory is that—

Once this step is completed, new possibilities open up, and the world in your mind is also completely transformed.

Unprestatability: The Unpredictability of the Future #

In 2012, Kauffman, along with mathematician Giuseppe Longo and biologist Maël Montévil from the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, proposed an even more profound assertion: namely that in the process of biological evolution, not only are future states unpredictable, but even the variables, functions, or ecological niches that will emerge in the future possibility space cannot be fully enumerated in advance. They termed this characteristic “unprestatability” [10].

In terms of concepts previously discussed in this course, this is precisely a form of “Knightian uncertainty”: meaning that future possibilities transcend the scope of our imagination. As Kauffman et al. stated: “We cannot write equations of motion for the evolving biosphere” [10].

One example Kauffman often cites is: Please list all the uses of a screwdriver [11].

You can think of many: tightening screws, prying open paint cans, propping open doors, as a weapon, for sculpting, sharpening pencils… However, you can never exhaust all its uses.

This is because “use” is not an intrinsic property of the screwdriver—it is a combination of the screwdriver with all possible scenarios, many of which have not yet emerged.

For instance, when the laser was first invented in 1960, researchers didn’t even know its practical applications and jokingly called it “a solution looking for a problem” [12]. At that time, no one could foresee applications like supermarket barcode scanning, fiber-optic communication, or vision correction surgery; yet, it was these later-emerging uses that sustained the enormous laser industry.

Applying “unprestatability” to individual development means that before you acquire a new skill, complete a new work, gain a new identity, or meet a new group of people, you cannot predict in advance what you will gain. Because the new “components” you create or acquire will combine with other things, even other new things, in unexpected ways.

For example, emerging professions like “esports player,” “live commerce host,” and “AI agent engineer” were completely unimaginable to the previous generation.

Just as when Morris Chang founded TSMC at 55, the pure-play wafer foundry business model did not yet exist. Only a few small chip design companies were interested in this model at the time. NVIDIA, for example, would not be founded until six years later, in 1993.

Due to “unprestatability,” Morris Chang could not pre-calculate how large TSMC’s future market size would be. He essentially built a factory in advance for an industry that had not yet been born.

However, if you don’t build this factory, that industry will never appear. As it turned out, Morris Chang’s “bet” was correct: Once TSMC truly existed, chip designers no longer needed to invest hundreds of millions of dollars to build factories; they could start companies with just a design blueprint, and only then could the species of “fabless chip companies” proliferate on a large scale. Qualcomm, NVIDIA, MediaTek, Apple’s chip division, and others all occupy this ecological niche [4].

Morris Chang could not have foreseen the emergence of smartphones and AI chips; those were the “adjacent possible” of the “adjacent possible”… of the “adjacent possible”—but without realizing the first possibility, all subsequent possibilities would be out of the question.

“Unprestatability” tells us that you cannot be loyal in advance to a self that does not yet exist; you can only explore through action, to “walk it into being.”

Operating Principles for Activating “The Adjacent Possible” #

The operating principles for activating “the adjacent possible” are very concise; your actions must satisfy the following three conditions—

First, it must be “adjacent.”

It’s not about taking a giant leap, but something achievable by leveraging your existing knowledge, resources, and relationships to make a manageable “stretch.” It needs to be novel enough to open new doors, but also “close” enough to be actually realized.

Second, it must leave behind a “real component.”

After each action, there should be something tangible added to the world. For example, a publicly published article, a functional prototype, a battle-tested skill, a collaborative relationship from a completed project, or a small group of real early adopters. Conversely, merely staying at the level of “having learned,” “having thought,” “having known,” or “having planned,” will not lead to any substantial change in the world.

Third, it must be able to participate in the “next combination.”

When evaluating something, don’t just ask “What immediate return can it bring me now?” but rather “What else can emerge from it once it’s completed?”

The first condition is about “exploration,” while the latter two are about “utilization,” or more directly: you need to “commit.” You must genuinely invest, putting in real money and effort, and actually do something.

“The adjacent possible” is not about “options.” Keeping all options open will not bring you new choices. You must commit to one option, even if it means sacrificing others, to open the next door.

Consider two engineers. Engineer A has a hundred brilliant ideas saved in their favorites. They keep them secret, fearing theft by others; they also delay practical implementation, believing that starting one idea means abandoning the rest. Engineer B, however, has only one idea that doesn’t seem particularly outstanding. Yet, they spend two months developing it into a rough gadget and releasing it.

The gadget drew a lot of criticism, but hidden within that feedback were real needs; B iterated three versions based on the feedback and gained their first users; among the users, an expert emerged and invited B to collaborate; the second product developed collaboratively was noticed and acquired by a company… As a result, in just three years, B transformed into someone they could never have imagined themselves to be. They now possessed many new possibilities—those once considered “impossible possibilities.”

And A? They still clung to their original hundred “possibles.”

The world doesn’t respond to your potential; it only responds to what you have actualized. And feedback changes you.

Application Scenarios of “The Adjacent Possible” #

Let’s look at a few specific application scenarios—

First, learning. The best unit of learning is not “a course” but rather “a project that is slightly above your current capability and can produce concrete deliverables within a few weeks”—the three layers of qualification in this statement precisely correspond to the three conditions mentioned above. After completing a course, the world might only have one more certificate describing you; but completing a project adds a tangible outcome to the world that can “speak for you.”

Next, career development. When comparing two job offers, most people weigh salary, title, and company reputation—these all measure “the intrinsic value of the current step itself.” However, you should also add a dimension to consider: “What transferable ‘components’ can I accumulate after three years?”

Some jobs appear glamorous, but their content is highly insular; after three years, you might gain nothing beyond your payslips. Other jobs may seem unremarkable but allow you to accumulate several “transferable components.” The most reliable way to change careers mid-life is not to completely abandon the past and “start over,” but rather to skillfully integrate previously accumulated “modules” into a new combination.

Finally, let’s discuss artificial intelligence (AI). The advent of AI has suddenly made a host of “components” “cheap” for everyone—for example, programming, translation, design, writing, research, etc. Many people are therefore worried, “Will AI replace me?” This is actually a flawed question framework; you are still focusing on past possibilities.

The correct question should be to actively explore the “adjacent possible”: “Which of my existing skills, combined with these new ‘components,’ can create an ‘action’ that didn’t exist last month?” Know that your “adjacent possible” space has just been greatly expanded by AI! You should be focusing on those newly emerging “territories”!

Revisiting Traditional Wisdom #

From the perspective of “the adjacent possible,” let’s revisit some related traditional wisdom.

For example, what constitutes “aiming too high”? And what constitutes “being down-to-earth”? Does setting high goals necessarily mean aiming too high, and does sticking to one’s small patch of land mean being down-to-earth?

As long as the goal you wish to achieve falls within your “adjacent possible,” it is perfectly reasonable, even if it sounds exceptionally grand. Conversely, if something falls outside your “adjacent possible,” even if it’s just moving bricks at a construction site, it cannot be considered truly down-to-earth.

“The adjacent possible” theory further reveals: your position is far more important than “who you are.” Different geographical locations correspond to different possibility spaces. And your abilities, network of contacts, and past experiences are essentially specific “positions” within that possibility space.

What you need to do is not to obsessively ask “Who am I?”, not to seek your “true self,” and certainly not to be troubled by your personality or hobbies. Those are merely temporary “positions.”

Courageously move to the next “position,” and you will discover entirely new possibilities that your current self cannot imagine.

New sprouts emerge from nearby ground, Doors open, and more doors are found. Do not pre-determine your own being, Walk to the unknown, and it forms itself.

Wild geese fly, their course not planned by East or West, Yet leave their footprints in the slushy crest. Look back to where no path was ever seen, Connected points, a trail has now been.

Notes #

[1] 張忠謀：《張忠謀自傳（上冊）：一九三一——一九六四》，台北：天下文化，1998。

[2] Texas Instruments. “From Idea to Invention: The Origin Story of the Tiny Chip That Changed the World.” September 12, 2022. https://www.ti.com/about-ti/behind-chip/articles/from-idea-to-invention-the-origin-story-of-the-tiny-chip-that-changed-the-world.html.

[3] 張忠謀：《張忠謀自傳（下冊）：一九六四——二〇一八》，台北：天下文化，2024。

[4] TSMC. “TSMC Chairman Dr. Morris Chang Receives Semiconductor Industry Association’s Highest Honor.” November 18, 2008. https://pr.tsmc.com/english/news/1528.

[5] Kauffman, Stuart A. Investigations. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

[6] Johnson, Steven. Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation. New York: Riverhead Books, 2010.

[7] Merton, Robert K. “Singletons and Multiples in Scientific Discovery: A Chapter in the Sociology of Science.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 105, no. 5 (1961): 470–486.

[8] Arthur, W. Brian. The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves. New York: Free Press, 2009.

[9] Hidalgo, César A., Bailey Klinger, Albert-László Barabási, and Ricardo Hausmann. “The Product Space Conditions the Development of Nations.” Science 317, no. 5837 (2007): 482–487. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1144581.

[10] Longo, Giuseppe, Maël Montévil, and Stuart Kauffman. “No Entailing Laws, but Enablement in the Evolution of the Biosphere.” In Proceedings of the 14th Annual Conference Companion on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation (GECCO ’12), 1379–1392. New York: ACM, 2012. https://doi.org/10.1145/2330784.2330946.

[11] Kauffman, Stuart A. A World Beyond Physics: The Emergence and Evolution of Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019, 118–119.

[12] Hecht, Jeff. “Short History of Laser Development.” Optical Engineering 49, no. 9 (2010): 091002. https://doi.org/10.1117/1.3483597.