The "Adjacent Possible" Is Your Biggest Competitive Advantage

Stuart Kauffman coined the term “adjacent possible” to describe the set of things that become possible the moment something new enters a system. It’s an evolutionary biology concept — but it’s also the most underused idea in business strategy.

What It Means for Leaders

The adjacent possible says: every capability you already have unlocks a set of new capabilities that become reachable. The tricky part is that most leaders only look at what’s already being done in their industry — they never see the adjacent possible from a neighboring industry.

The Move

Spend a day per quarter reading trade publications from an industry you don’t work in. Not for inspiration — for mechanics. How do they solve staffing? Pricing? Customer acquisition? The answers are rarely one-to-one, but the shapes of the solutions are transferable.