The paper discusses the methodological aspects of the principles of adaptive management for socio-economic, economic-ecological and other systems. Adaptive management includes a set of methods that allow to change the parameters of the regulating system depending on management actions and outcomes and external impacts. Adaptive management is based inter alia on the principles of �precedence� (past experience) and �transcendence� (beyond experience). The principle of precedence includes past experience in decision making (study the problem "from the bottom"). Based on the definition of transcendence (something that is fundamentally unavailable to experiential knowledge or not based on experience), transcendental analysis is considered as analysis of complex nonlinear phenomena and processes with a high degree of uncertainty (study the problem �from the top�). The paper presents a conceptual model of adaptive management based on the principles of precedence and transcendence. This model includes the next steps: definition and general description of the object of adaptive management; study of the object "from the bottom", based on past experience; study the object of adaptive management "from the top", taking into account a kind of "absolute", which goes beyond the existing experience; vision of the system based on the incidence matrix, ranking of interests and threats; decision making taking into account improvement of previous decisions and implementation of idealized transcendental model. The concept of the principles of precedence and transcendence in adaptive management is considered in the paper in the context of incident theory in order to form the system vision and rank the system from the point of view of interests (as a resource of development) or threats (as an anti-resource of development)