Liminal Learnership

The spaces in between

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Humans have always been fascinated by the grey areas in life. The place where something has ended but nothing has started — the fuzzy fringes.

In business conversations, this has been articulated into a concept called Liminal Leadership, which speaks to how we lead in the in between, relational spaces.

It’s certainly not a stretch to say if ever there was a liminal moment in the world, it is now. We are currently sitting in between a pandemic and what comes next, and our inter-dependencies are more important than ever.

While history has revealed many transitional periods for the human race, it has never before seen the intersection of digital technology and its eruption of communication modalities, with an unchecked global disease, and a looming global environmental catastrophe.

Some might call it the eye of a dark and perfect storm.

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We certainly can no longer continue to pretend that we are independent, discrete individuals, disconnected from all that is around us. Or that our volatile environment will respond to simple linear fixes.

But fortunately, we can still learn.

Complexity and interdependency are messy. The relational processes that are at work are in motion — always calibrating, changing, and compensating. In between the hours, in between the phases of evolution, in between being professionals and parents and lovers, friends and patients and citizens, activists and athletes — in the liminal land of being alive together in this incoherent moment, there is mutual learning. Between us is the genesis of ability to perceive and respond to the complexity of this time.

— Nora Bateson

If we operate from Bateson’s paradigm — of learning in complexity — we can all be seen as agents of change, and the recent swelling of social movements across the globe supports this notion of new power, networked affinities, and crowd wisdom.

We can all make a difference.

And, perhaps, this is pointing us to a new frontier — the dismantling of the concept of leadership in order to make way for something more responsive, nuanced, and distributed.

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In liminal spaces, we are potentially all leaders because we are all learners. So maybe the custodians of now and the future, are skilled at “learnership” rather than “leadership,” are understanding the critical importance of social capital and developing high-level relationships, and are exercising inspirit influence as their new power, to reach the many.

Such a leader will be curious, resilient, and visionary. They will be at ease in complexity and “not being right.” “Not being right” will not damage their self-image but will instead excite their awe.

They are able to incorporate and organise the “warm data” of relational interconnected systems, recognising patterns and flow. This means flinging open the window to the new insights and altered perceptions emerging from inter-generational kinematics — that is, the long, inexorable process of evolution in the human and natural world.

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These learnerships will shift from “ego”, not simply to “eco”, but to “alter” — by definition a transformational state open to reshaping and re-dispersal. Alter will become a space for letting go, freeing them to move smoothly on the planes between logic and its anti-pole, fervour and poise, and between and beyond.

It is liminal heaven: and our next evolutionary state.

Liminal

The space between

Neither this

not that

Ripe, potent, uncertain, shaky

A Dawning, a Dusking…

The immanent threshold

emerging

crossing… to what?

The moment is calling you

to pay…exquisite…attention

(Christine McDougall)