There is a concept in complexity theory and evolutionary biology, popularized in innovation research, called the adjacent possible. The idea is this: at any moment, what is possible is defined by what already exists. New possibilities open up at the edges of current reality — not anywhere, and not everywhere, but specifically at the boundaries between things that are already established.
You cannot leap to something entirely novel. But from wherever you currently are, certain adjacent territories become accessible. Once you enter those territories, new adjacent territories open up that were not visible from where you started. Innovation, in this frame, is not a leap. It is a series of steps through an expanding frontier, each step making new steps possible.
Stuart Kauffman developed the formal concept. Cal Newport, in adjacent territory himself, gestures toward how it applies to the development of careers and capabilities. I have found it useful for understanding what position I find myself in.
Two Worlds With a Border
Business consulting and magic performance are not adjacent fields in the professional world’s taxonomy. They belong to different categories, occupy different social spaces, and almost never appear in the same professional biography. The consultant goes to one conference. The performer goes to another. The skills, the communities, the language, the criteria for success — almost nothing overlaps.
Except that they both work on the same underlying system: human attention, perception, and decision-making.
The consultant’s job is to understand how decisions are made in organizations, how attention is allocated, what factors influence people to see situations in one way rather than another. The magician’s job is to understand how attention is directed, how perception can be shaped, what psychological conditions make an impossible thing seem genuine. The domains are entirely different. The underlying subject is the same.
This is the adjacent possible. Two established territories that do not normally touch, with a border between them that has barely been explored.
What Exists at the Border
The territory at the border between business consulting and magic performance does not have a name yet. It is not a recognized field. It is not something you can get a degree in or a certification for. The people who live in this territory are rare, and most of them arrived here, as I did, by following something interesting rather than by executing a plan.
What exists at the border is a set of possibilities that neither world has alone.
From the magic side: the ability to make abstract concepts experiential. Magic performance is fundamentally about creating direct experience rather than conveying information. You do not tell the audience that attention is limited — you demonstrate it, viscerally, by directing their attention and then revealing what they missed while their attention was elsewhere. You do not lecture about cognitive bias — you let the audience discover their own bias in real time, from the inside.
From the consulting side: the ability to connect the experience to a framework that gives it organizational relevance. A magic demonstration of cognitive limitation is interesting. A magic demonstration of cognitive limitation, connected to a specific decision-making pattern in organizations, connected to a practical framework for addressing that pattern — this is something different. The magic creates the emotional opening. The consulting gives it strategic consequence.
Neither world has this combination alone. The magician who has not engaged deeply with organizational decision-making cannot make the connection to business context. The consultant who has not developed performing skill cannot create the direct experiential moment that bypasses the defensive intellect.
At the border, both are available. And the combination produces something neither world had before.
The Keynote as Adjacent Possible
The keynote speaking I do now — where magic is integrated into presentations on business strategy, innovation, and decision-making — is a practical manifestation of the adjacent possible.
A standard business keynote delivers information and argument. The audience engages intellectually. At best, a compelling narrative makes the intellectual engagement emotionally resonant. The audience leaves with new frameworks, new data points, new arguments.
A standard magic performance delivers astonishment and entertainment. The audience engages emotionally. At best, the wonder produced is significant enough that it generates sustained reflection. The audience leaves with an experience, usually one they cannot fully articulate.
The keynote that incorporates magic — designed to use the direct experiential element of magic to create emotional openings that the intellectual content then fills — has access to both modes. The audience is reached on multiple levels simultaneously. The magic does not ornament the content; the magic and the content are integrated in a way where each makes the other more powerful.
This format barely exists. It is not taught in keynote training programs. It is not a recognized genre. It exists at the border, and it is possible only because someone happened to develop serious capability in both territories.
What the Border Requires
Occupying a border territory requires something that is psychologically uncomfortable: genuine competence in two domains that do not usually communicate, maintained simultaneously without reducing one to serve the other.
The temptation in any border territory is to become a tourist in one domain and a native in the other. To be primarily a consultant who occasionally uses magic as a hook. Or primarily a magician who occasionally speaks at corporate events.
Both of those are adjacent to the border but not in it. The genuine border territory requires taking both domains seriously enough that you have built real capability in each — not as a curiosity about the other domain but as a genuine practitioner of it.
This is why the development has to be serious. The consulting depth and the performing depth are not interchangeable. You cannot fake the performing depth with consulting skills, and you cannot fake the consulting depth with performing skills. Both have to be real.
The border opens when both are real. And what it opens into is a territory that neither world could access alone.
Vulpine Creations as Adjacent Possible
When Adam Wilber and I co-founded Vulpine Creations, we were, in a sense, institutionalizing the adjacent possible. Adam came with deep performing craft and a specific creative vision for effect design. I came with strategy, business thinking, and a background that straddled professional and performing worlds.
The company exists at the border too. Magic companies are typically run by performers. Consulting firms do not design magic effects. Vulpine occupies territory that neither category fully describes.
The products we develop, the thinking we bring to effect design, the way we think about the relationship between performance and the human experience of wonder — this is border territory. It is possible because of the specific combination of backgrounds that founded the company.
The Expansion of the Adjacent Possible
Here is the thing about the adjacent possible that I find most interesting: each step into border territory opens new adjacent territory that was not visible from where you started.
When I developed enough performing capability to integrate magic into keynotes, new possibilities opened up that I could not have anticipated: the ability to use magic as a research tool for understanding attention and decision-making; the ability to speak to audiences about cognitive science using performance as demonstration; the ability to work with organizations on their communication practices from the perspective of someone who has studied misdirection as a craft.
None of these were visible from the starting point. They became visible from the border territory, once enough capability had been built to get there.
The adjacent possible keeps expanding. Each new capability creates new borders. Each new border creates new possibilities that did not exist before.
A Practical Point for Practitioners
I think the adjacent possible has a practical implication that is worth making explicit.
If you have developed real capability in two or more domains that do not normally communicate, you are in border territory whether you intended to be or not. And border territory is where the most interesting work happens, because the work that is possible there is not possible anywhere else.
The consultant who also has performing depth. The performer who also has genuine business experience. The teacher who has deep craft knowledge. The engineer who has developed a serious artistic practice.
These combinations are rare because most people follow single tracks. Professional specialization encourages depth in one area. The energy required to develop genuine capability in multiple domains is large.
But the person who has managed it — through whatever combination of circumstance, interest, and sustained effort — occupies territory that has very few neighbors.
The most interesting things tend to happen where very few people are.
The magic and the consulting met in hotel rooms in Vienna and Graz and London and a dozen other cities over nine years of parallel development. The convergence was not planned. It was the natural result of following what was interesting wherever it led.
The territory at the intersection is still being mapped. That is the point. That is what makes it interesting.