Exaptation is a shift where a trait developed for one purpose starts to serve a new function.
I decided to also name this company after it — let me elaborate:
We call it Innovation when a big change has been established and widely accepted. The process of innovation is always an exaptive process. Borrowing the famous example of feathers being developed for sexual display and temperature regulation and exapting into flight, or almost every breakthrough in medicine which was an unintended side-effect together with the realisation of significance.
So really, when Innovation is what we want, what we need is a system where realising significance has a low energy cost, in order to exapt existing capabilities into novel ideas. Doing that is an Exaptation.
We — as in humans — are good at optimising under the assumption that the status quo stays the same. If you grew up in one of the North Atlantic countries, uncertainty hadn't played a major role in daily life until Covid.
Optimising like this only works as long as you can ignore the ground you're standing on — the underlying conditions that actually determine what's possible. What we lack is an understanding of this substrate, and how our artificially created structures relate to it. The result is systems and organisations that look efficient on the surface but become brittle the moment the ground starts to shake.
I have experienced huge amounts of unrealised potential, and time and energy lost in the sophistication of artificially created systems.
I'm taking anthro-complexity as a foundation, repurposing my own generalist approach to software, and bundling it up as a consultancy.
Helping companies and organisations working with software move to a complexity-informed place — one where exaptive practices emerge naturally, rather than being something an external consultancy is hired to perform.
Caring for the soil, rather than planting an exotic flower in a wild garden.
That is the alternative I'd like to offer. And believe me when I say: this is the most afraid I have ever been of failing, while at the same time feeling like I am finally committing to where I thrive the most.