The adjacent possible

Steven Johnson is one of my favourite authors.  He thinks deeply over a gamut of topics ranging from the impact of new technologies to urban planning and collaborates with the likes of Brian Eno, which is just a little bit sexy.  His latest book is Where Good Ideas Come From, (cool YouTube summary here.)

The idea that intrigued me the most was the 'adjacent possible'.  The term was coined by an evolutionary biologist named Stuart Kauffman to describe how the building blocks of life can only have emerged in a certain sequence: -

In the case of the prebiotic chemistry, the adjacent possible defines all those molecular reactions that were directly achievable in the primordial soup.  Sunflowers and mosquitoes and brains exist outside of that circle of possibility.  The adjacent possible is 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.

p. 31

The idea speaks directly to many aspects of life but especially to the human impulse for storytelling.  In a good story events unfold in a sequence.  The building blocks of character and incident get combined and recombined in an order that the listener finds inherently pleasing.  The same goes for a great symphony or pop song or play or joke.  It's the logic that underpins the mildly addictive iPhone game Doodle God.  It's presumably why a rule of thumb states that no new characters can appear in a film script after page 50.

I think it's especially good way to distinguish between good improvisers and average ones.  Once you master the basics improv is a great platform for wacky ideas.  For a while every improviser goes through a the-wackier-the-idea-the-better phase but at its heart improv is a storytelling discipline, which is where the idea of the adjacent possible hits home: -

The weaker, wackier improviser will jump from establishing premise to zany-crazy outcome in a heartbeat then wonder why his (admittedly very funny) ideas leave the audience cold.  The stronger improviser will take us to exactly the same place but slowly.  She'll combine and recombine ideas and so usher us into that wonderful shadow future

This is why weaker improvisers prefer 'time warp' formats that rely on the viewer mentally joining up the deliberate gaps left in the narrative.  Audiences will happily participate in this game (and they are genuinely participating) but this is very different from the satisfaction of watching events unfold in the manner of 'proper' storytelling.

Stand-up comics must have an innate understanding of the adjacent possible; if you don't take the audience with you then you're on your own, which is an extremely lonely place to be with a mic in your hand.  A great routine will make leaps in logic that are precisely calibrated to reward the audience for keeping up.  The rest of us do well to remember the great Logan Murray's definition of a good joke: -

All information necessary for the punchline is present in the set-up

It took me ages to see just how wonderful this definition is.  And a perfect example of the adjacent possible.