The adjacent possible, a concept introduced by Stuart Kauffman and popularized by Steven Johnson, refers to the set of all possible next steps or innovations that are immediately accessible from a given state of a system.
It represents the territory of potential discoveries or creations that are just a short step away from what already exists.
“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.”