Adjacent Possibles
I was staring at a floor of hexagonal terracotta tiles (tomettes, the kind laid in southern French houses for two centuries) when the metaphor arrived uninvited. One tile is where I stand. Six neighbours are six places I could move next. Move to one of them, and a different set of six surrounds me. Stay where I am, and the world is exactly six tiles wide.
That night, after a couple of hours hunting through the web, I found Stuart Kauffman. The biologist who, around the turn of the millennium, named the adjacent possible: the rim of futures available from any present state, not infinite, not arbitrary, but real and quietly ready to be entered. Kauffman built the idea to explain biological evolution beyond Darwinism. I cared about the smaller, daily question: how does a person choose what to do next?
The tiles gave me the metaphor. Kauffman gave me the name. The rest of this piece is what I have done with both.
From hexagon to dodecahedron
A flat tile gives you six adjacent possibles. That, I came to think, is poor.
I have watched myself, my friends, my clients, and the teams I have run for a long time. The lived count of plausible next moves at any given moment is higher than six, and lower than infinity. Empirically, the right number sits somewhere around twelve. So I left the floor and went up a dimension. The hexagon became a dodecahedron: twelve regular pentagonal faces, the Platonic solid that role-players will recognise as a D12.
Picture yourself standing inside one. The dodecahedron is your present configuration: roles, habits, beliefs, contracts, the shape of your week. Each of the twelve faces is a door. None of the doors is visible from the centre. You have to walk to the wall before you can read what’s behind it.
If you stay in the middle, the walls might as well not exist. You will tell yourself you have no choice. That sentence is almost always false. It is reported from the centre of a dodecahedron whose faces have not been inspected.
Walking to a face is the move. Pressing your forehead against it changes the geometry: from there, the edges and vertices of your current solid touch two or three more dodecahedra, and you start to glimpse what lies beyond your immediate set. The further out you stand, the more of the next solid you can see. This is what a fractional CIO sees in a team that finally takes initiative; what I saw in myself the year I first delegated something I had been hoarding. Movement at the edge does not just relocate you. It widens the world.
Each level is a dodecahedron
In January 2016 I sat through a Frédéric Laloux lecture in Paris and, more usefully, the workshop the day before. It was the first time anyone walked me through Spiral Dynamics: the developmental theory built by Clare Graves and refined by Don Beck and Christopher Cowan. Levels of values and consciousness through which individuals, teams, and societies pass. Not a ladder of merit. A topology of complexity.
The graft is simple. Each level of the spiral is a particular kind of dodecahedron. The faces available to you depend on the level you are at right now. If you cannot see a possible, it is often because it does not yet exist for you: it lives in the dodecahedron of a different level, and your present geometry has no door to it.
This matters for two reasons. The first is that staying is a real choice; many people stay for decades inside a level they have outgrown, and call it stability. The second is that regression is the under-discussed risk: pick a face for the wrong reason (fatigue, fear, a half-understood opportunity) and you can land in a smaller solid than the one you left.
Recognising the level you are on is most of the work. The rest is choosing which face to push against.
Ikigai as compass
The Western shorthand for ikigai (the four-circle Venn of what you love, what you’re good at, what the world needs, what someone will pay for) is not the Japanese original. It is a flatter, more useful tool. I keep it because it filters.
In a dodecahedron of twelve faces, ikigai picks three or four. The rest, however shiny, are bad bets. The job that flatters your competence but bores you. The mission you’d love but no one funds. The cause you’d be paid for but the world doesn’t need. Each of those is a face you could open and regret.
When I have been close to my ikigai (and there have been such years), every adjacent possible came tested by the four circles. When I have drifted, no compass; many faces, all equally appealing, none of them right. That is the signature of being lost. Not absence of options. Excess of them.
Ikigai compresses the choice. It does not make it.
The faculty of sight
None of this works without the most boring prerequisite: seeing.
You cannot pick a face you do not perceive. You cannot perceive a face that contradicts a belief you are still defending. The literature on self-awareness is large and mostly soft; the practical part is small. Three things have done the heavy lifting for me.
Sit and watch. I have used Insight Timer since 2016. Twenty minutes a day, sometimes ten. It is not the spiritual claim that matters. It is the mechanical one. Meditation interrupts the loop thought → emotion → behaviour before it closes. That interruption is where adjacent possibles become visible. A walked path through pine forest does the same. So does Qi Gong. The cushion is not load-bearing. The interruption is.
Write it down. Reflection on paper, by hand or by keyboard, makes desires distinguishable from fears. Fear borrowed from someone else does not survive being written down in plain sentences.
Step out. New experiences (a different country, an unfamiliar codebase, a volunteer post in a sector you don’t know) recalibrate the instrument. Without them, you are measuring the world with a scale that has not been re-zeroed in years.
These three are not a syllabus. They are how I stay capable of seeing the doors of my own dodecahedron when they appear.
Other people’s dodecahedra
I could stop here. The metaphor is operational; you could navigate from it alone. But solitary navigation is not what I believe in, and not what most of my work is about.
Every person around you is moving inside their own dodecahedron, at their own pace, on their own level of the spiral. The collisions are most of what we call interpersonal difficulty. It is not that we disagree. It is that we are walking in differently shaped rooms.
A few practices have, slowly, made me less terrible at this.
Listen as if the room is theirs, not yours. Empathy is not agreeing: it is briefly inhabiting the geometry of the other.
Use Nonviolent Communication when the room gets hot. Marshall Rosenberg’s framework is dated in places, and it works. I have rarely seen a meeting it did not improve.
Treat differences as load-bearing. In nineteen years running a sociocratic SMB, the strongest decisions came from circles whose members were standing on different faces. Sociocracy 3.0 (the version I currently lean on) turns that divergence into operational fuel rather than friction.
Notice the interdependence. Your moves narrow or widen the dodecahedra of the people around you. A leader who centralises decisions shrinks the solids of an entire team. A leader who delegates does the opposite. The metaphor is private; the consequences are not.
At the edge
I have walked to the wall many times. The decisions I am proudest of came from there. The ones I most regret came from staying at the centre: telling myself I had no choice when I had simply not gone close enough to read the doors.
The geometry is, in practice, generous. There is almost always a door. There are almost always three or four worth pushing on. Most of the time, what is missing is not the doors. It is the willingness to walk to the wall.
The wall is the work. The doors will be there.
Wanderer, your footsteps are the road, and nothing more; wanderer, there is no road, the road is made by walking. — Antonio Machado, Proverbios y cantares, 1912