In this presentation, the speaker guides leaders on how to cultivate a future‑oriented voice by inhabiting the liminal space between past and future. Using the Roman god Janus as a metaphor, she explains that effective futurist leaders must simultaneously look backward to understand history and forward to anticipate emerging possibilities. She highlights the challenge of certainty‑seeking mindsets that either cling to the past or rush toward the future, and stresses the need to balance both perspectives. The talk outlines the development of a futures‑focused mindset, the competencies required to lead organizations into uncertain futures, and the transition from merely possessing a toolbox of futures methods to actually mastering the skills to apply those tools in leadership practice.
Chapters
Alright, so we've looked at how to notice those emerging signals, how to hold potential futures. Now we're going to look at developing a future-oriented voice. You're a leader. You know you're operating in this liminal space. How do you do that? How do you express this? How do you talk about these things? So let's play with that a little bit. The liminal space is this threshold between 2 places, and it's a threshold that needs to be crossed. If you're looking at old buildings, that entrance space— and my husband and I had a long conversation about this the other day— about when you're in a place or a building or a complex and there's only one gate to guard, it feels like you're more secure because you only have to defend that one place, that one entrance. But on the other hand, you also can't escape because you're kind of trapped in there. But are we protecting ourselves with that one entrance, or are we opening it up to invite movement and people in? It's really interesting how we see that particular entrance or transition point, that threshold. But one of the ways to look at a threshold is not to be looking at things on one side or the other, but to see what it's like being in the middle of that threshold, standing in that particular place. I'd like to remind you of a Roman god called Janus. Janus is this two-headed god who looks both forwards and backwards. He looks to the future and to history. He's associated with doorways, gateways, passages, beginnings and endings of things. And he's depicted with these, these 2 faces because he's doing them at the same time. And that's what you need to do as a futurist liminal leader, is you need to be looking in both directions at the same time. And you can develop that capacity, or you already have that capacity. Not everybody does. Some people are so needing that certainty that they cannot look in both directions. They might be looking to the past, to history, to hurts, to traditions that they want to hold on to because the future is full of anxiety. Or there could be a lot of really unpleasant things in their past and they're trying to reject it and they only want to look towards the future. You need to be able to be in both spaces at the same time. So he stands in the doorway not in the past, he doesn't belong to the past, he doesn't belong to the future. For yourself, you're saying, what is it that we're leaving behind? What is it that we're carrying forward? What were we? What did we used to be? And what are we going to become? And that's what you need to play with. There's a lot to developing a futures-focused mindset, to developing the competencies that allow us to lead our organizations into the future. And I've mentioned some of the tools. There's also the mindsets, that we need to develop, and we also need to not just suddenly have a toolbox but develop the skills to use those tools.
