Brand and the adjacent possible

I’m currently reading Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From and one of the ideas he talks about he calls the adjacent possible. He describes it in this way:

“Think of it as a house that magically expands with each door you open. You begin in a room with four doors, each leading to a new room that you haven’t visited yet. Those four rooms are the adjacent possible. But once you open one of those doors and stroll into that room, three new doors appear, each leading to a brand new room that you couldn’t have reached from your original starting point. Keep opening new doors and eventually you’ll have built a palace.”

While the fundamental relationship that he talks about here is in reference to ideas and innovation, he could just as easily be speaking about brands (and yes I am going to take some liberties with his theory so stay with me).

Brands are built, much like the palace Johnson refers to, through a similar series of interconnected actions, decisions and promises each related to those that came before like the doors opening off those rooms.

As architects of the brand you get to choose what you build – what doors you open. The original purpose and values of your brand leads to doors that shape actions and decisions, which in turn lead to products and services, which in turn lead to customers who respond, which leads to the next set of doors, and on and on.

When brands try and jump ahead ignoring the adjacent possible, the result feels out of alignment, like there is a disconnect between the promises an organisation is making and the ones they are keeping or not keeping.

Some brands such as Virgin appear to be the exceptions to the laws of adjacent possible, jumping ahead into new and seemingly unrelated areas of business. However, I suggest that all Virgin’s business is connected to their purpose and values. In effect they are opening new doors off the original room expanding their “palace” each time with a series of new wings, connected at one level but mostly separate at the edges.

When an organisation treats their brand as marketing, they are nearly always operating outside of the law of the adjacent possible. Telstra is a great example of this. By trying to jump out ahead and “create” the brand at the customer level, without moving through the previous rooms first (aka doing the work inside and then building from that), there is no connecting structure to support it. And without the structure the adjacent possible provides, that makes it nearly impossible for people to believe in the brand.

Does your brand follow the law of the adjacent possible? Are your rooms standing alone with no doors open? Or does each promise connect to another back through the organisation?

See you next week.

Michel Hogan is an independent Brand adviser and advocate. Through her work with Brandology here in Australia and in the United States she helps organisations make promises they can keep and keep the promises they make, with a strong sustainable brand as the result. She also publishes the Brand thought leadership blog – Brand Alignment. You can follow Michel on Twitter @michelhogan.