Creative Change in Small steps
by Stanley
| | | ...We not only do not know what will happen, we do not even know what can happen! Stuart Kauffman |
Whenever you take action there is always the risk that you will get more than you bargained for; that ‘more’ may be welcome or not. But there’s a fair certainty that there will some surprises. It’s the nature of engagement with the world. Some surprises can alter the course of your whole life. Being the unadventurous type, it’s what makes people like me careful. Besides what is right theoretically, I have to take into account all my personal complexes, whether the consequences of my action will clash with all the curious things that are important to me. In any kind of future, what I can accept and make use of is constrained by what is possible for me by the facts of my psychology; I’m limited not just by situations, but by who I am and what I have become.
Let’s say I’m dealing with a difficult situation and I don’t know which way to go. I’m looking for a new way, a new idea. But I can’t know in advance what is possible until I begin to move forward. Gingerly, pessimistically perhaps, I try a new tack. I can guess, but I don’t know what will happen. But I do know that if I try something different it will lead to new developments, all of which I cannot foresee. Such consequences, some anticipated, some quite unforeseen, are what we could call adjacent possibilities.[1] Some we are not aware of until they happen. Not only do we ‘not know what will happen, we do not even know what can happen!’ In order to grasp this notion of ‘adjacent possibility’ let’s look at what it means in biology. My examples here may seem a bit way out – but bear with me.
Swimming fish evolved from spineless bottom feeders, segmented worms, sponges, and corals. They evolved into the first vertebrates. 400 hundred million years ago they began to probe the water’s edge and wiggle their way onto land. What they had developed as fins, they began to use as the first ‘legs’. Of all the thousand ways evolution could have gone, this was only one. It was a possible next step: an adjacent possibility. Before the development of backbones there was not even the remotest chance of moving out of the water. It was physiologically impossible. But having developed vertebrae and fins no one could have predicted what that would lead to – in fact, it led to us! Among other things.
The closest fossil relatives of birds were two-legged dinosaurs called theropods. They sported feathers but could not fly. Its common ancestor didn’t develop feathers in order to fly, but to keep warm. Having done so, some bright theropod found that using feathers he could glide. Gliding was an adjacent possibility which then evolved into flying – to birds, in fact. Until the development of feathers to keep warm, flight could not have evolved – feathers, as we say, was a serendipitous window of opportunity. Evolution is full of examples where a function that had evolved for one purpose revealed the possibility of a completely different use, opening up new and unforeseeable realms of creative development.
Evolution by natural selection is extremely slow, but incremental change, where adjacent possibilities are seized upon, is much faster. It is as though the main work has already been done. It’s only a question of seeing a novel way of using what is already there. It’s the same in our personal development and the same in the cultural sphere. Advances in technology are built upon platforms that are already established. ‘Alicia Juarrero, a philosopher, asks, ‘Could you cash a check 50,000 years ago? Think of the cultural inventions that have occurred to allow us to cash checks.’
In our lifetime we have seen computer technology race ahead, literally in leaps and bounds. Each step creates the adjacent possibilities necessary for the next step. When they were creating the first computer program in 1997, you couldn’t have said to Bill Gates and Paul Allen: “Hey, lets create the World Wide Web, then we can have Internet Banking and Twitter.” Even if you could have explained your far sighted vision of the future it would have been just hot air – interesting maybe, but useless. At that time it was not yet an adjacent possibility – but the first Microsoft operating system for an IBM was.
In a similar way, as we go through life we build platform upon platform. It’s called personal development. What is possible at later stage is not possible early on. We cannot ask a child to read philosophy; it is not an adjacent possibility. It may be one day – it may not. It may never be. What step can come next depends on what steps have gone before. For each step makes certain developments possible and others out of the question. And since we all have different experiences in life we build different platforms – gradually housing our unique personalities.
Now think of the therapist who suggests a new way of thinking or feeling to the client or makes helpful proposals. In all likelihood he will be advancing a notion for which there is no precise platform in the person’s psyche. It is possible to impose a change, but this is more like head-training than real growth. It is unintegrated and therefore does not provide a further platform from which to move forward.
Advice to a friend or client might be great. But if there is no platform already there from which it can take off, if it does not awaken an adjacent possibility, then forget it. But always remember, there is no right path forward. Looking back one might get the feeling that a certain development was inevitable – but that’s only hindsight.
The kind of development we are talking about is indeterminate, unpredictable, asymmetric and nonlinear, but nevertheless quite real. In sensing your way forward what comes next, the adjacent possible, may not be an ‘action’ in the literal sense; it may be an imagining, a dream, an idea, an emotion, a fantasy. We have to get out of our literal habit of putting everything in neat little boxes. An event is an event.
As for the good meaning friends who advise on a personal difficulty, it’s a good bet that anything they may suggest will not feel exactly right. It is almost impossible to guess a person’s adjacent possibilities in any situation. Therapeutic time is much better spent feeling for the adjacent possibilities that present themselves right now. No one can know the exact nature of those possibilities but the person themselves. It must come from them, from their felt-sense.
In Gendlin’s focusing language, the adjacent possibility, he would call ‘the implicit’. Both terms simply mean the ‘next possible step’. It also means that as you feel your way into a new possibility it may have completely unknown applications. Imagine the first fish saying to another fish:
‘Good God, I never realized these fins would be useful for walking’
‘For what ?
‘For walking.
‘Oh Yeah – what the hell’s that !!!
[1] Stuart Kauffman, who coined the term Adjacent Possibility, is a biologist with a background in philosophy.
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