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Transversal refers to a form of sideways or lateral movement that cuts across established pathways, domains, or developmental trajectories. Rather than following a linear, predetermined path toward a predetermined goal, transversal movements create unexpected connections and new possibilities through cross-domain transformation.
While they might go unnoticed, transversal pathways and movements are always present, necessary, profoundly active, and possible in even the most seemingly linear and regimented of systems. In most contexts, transversal paths are always multiple (see Thickets):
Sideways movement: Characterized by lateral shifts across different domains or contexts rather than forward progress within a single domain. These movements create "entangled thickets" of interconnection rather than tree-like hierarchies. Such movements can happen at any time and place.
Transversal movements contradict the notion that change, evolution or innovation follows a straight line toward predetermined ends. Instead of seeing development as "half steps" toward a final form (like "half a wing" evolving into a complete wing), transversal processes recognize that each state/moment has its own completeness, contextual utility and is always open to move towards multiple other possible futures.
Transduction (non-linear movement): Sideways or horizontal movements give rise to the unexpected interaction of unlike things that lead to novel emergent relations towards novel processes, practices, techniques, or ecologies across vastly differing fields. For example, the horizontal exchange of genetic materials between fungi and early aquatic plants led to qualitatively novel plant forms that came onto land. Small additions have large transformational impacts.
Evolutionary biology: Darwin initially made the mistake of seeing wings as developing in a linear progression toward flight, but later recognized that early feathered arms (wings) served completely different functions (warmth, display, egg laying, defence, etc.). And that any existing effect could be co-opted transversally towards the co-development of new qualitatively different effects, including swimming, egg warming, flight, sexual display, running, etc.
Lynn Magulis (and many Soviet Evolutionary Biologists) discovered that the major qualitative developments in evolution (such as the emergence of multicellular life) were the outcome of one cell engulfing another very different one (Endosymbiosis) rather than a linear process of branching speciation.
Creative practice: In creative contexts, transversal approaches involve deliberately breaking patterns and exploring unexpected configurations, such as stopping processes at unconventional times or using tools in unintended ways to discover new possibilities.
Transversal movements appear as the co-opting of intentional things for unintended uses in new contexts (exaptative design), transformative hybridization and cross-pollination between different approaches. The history of early experiments in heavier than air human powered flight shows how various innovators borrowed, adapted, and recombined elements across approaches rather than working in isolation.
Organizational design: Facilitating transversal movement requires infrastructure that enables practices, technologies, people and even environments to leap into new configurations in a strategic and ongoing manner. to shift between roles, share knowledge openly, and allow failures to contribute to other directions rather than narrowing toward a single approach.
Transversal thinking is closely associated with emergent properties in complex systems, meta-stability across different states, and the concept of "following unintended capacities" in experimentation (exaptation). It challenges essentialist models of creativity and innovation that presume predetermined endpoints or linear development paths.
Sources and Connections to Explore: Often called Rhizomes, and the practice, Rhizomatics. Especially developed in the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari: A Thousand Plateaus, Acquiring Genomes Lynn Margulis, Concepts of Symbiogenesis Liya Nikolaevna Khakhina
See: Thickets, Exaptation, Emergence
