In this talk, the speaker reframes futures thinking as an expedition rather than a GPS‑guided journey, emphasizing that the future is unknown and requires skilled leaders to navigate. They introduce Arnold van Gennep’s early‑20th‑century work on rites of passage, explaining the concept of liminality—the transitional space between two states. The speaker highlights how many cultures use rituals to mark life’s major transitions—birth, marriage, death—and notes that modern Western societies, especially after COVID‑19, have lost many of these communal practices, such as in‑person funerals. They argue that both individuals and organizations must deliberately create or revive rituals to acknowledge and support these liminal moments. Finally, the talk calls on “liminal leaders” to help teams move through undefined, transitional spaces, guiding them from what they are leaving behind toward an uncertain future.
Chapters
That's what we're going to explore. But first, I'm going to just take us backwards a little bit to an invitation to an expedition into the past, just to uncover some of the concepts we're looking at. And I always use the word expedition when talking about futures thinking rather than journey. If you go on a journey these days, I definitely would have my GPS on, no matter even if it's here at home in Cape Town. So I know exactly where I'm going, which are the best routes, and if you've got the right kind of GPS, it'll tell you if there's, you know, a traffic jam there and you should take an alternative route, and you can tell exactly how long you're going to take to get there. Those are all defined qualities. When you're looking at the future, you do not have the luxury of those defined qualities, so you're going on an expedition to discover things, and you can't You can't get a tour guide to the future, somebody who has been there before, who knows everything. You can only get an experienced expedition leader who is experienced in navigating the unknowns. That's how you travel into the future. And that's what you as liminal leaders, future-focused leaders, need to develop is that ability to take your team and your people with you into a future that is not yet defined, where there are still lots of unknowns around the corner. So it's an expedition. This particular expedition, we're just going backwards a little bit so that I can introduce you to somebody I didn't know existed. His name is Arnold von Gennep. In the early 1900s, he wrote a book in French called The Rites of Passage, and that's where he introduced the concept of liminality, the transition space, the space in between 2 things that are happening. And a lot of it, because he's talking about rites of passage, It's when we move from one state as, as a human, we move from one state to another. And in many cultures, there are good rituals that, that help us to, to navigate those spaces, to, to acknowledge them, to pause. When a baby is born and comes into, into the world, into a family, when 2 people get married, when you have various religious rites of initiation. Another transition period that we don't honor enough in this day and age, maybe in Western culture, is that period of time, that transition as a person faces their death. And sitting with somebody, being with somebody navigating that space is difficult. But an important thing to do. And then we have the actual funeral process, and I think we've lost a lot in this since COVID and since we've had technology and we can have all of our funerals on Zoom. It makes it completely— it loses something of that nature of coming together to acknowledge a life that was important that has now you know, lost from us and passed on. And we need to find ways to capture those spaces. Those are big moments in our lives, but we can do that for ourselves in our personal moments of transition. And we certainly need to learn how to do that in, in a workplace when you're working with other teams. How do we help them to navigate what we have to leave behind and what we have to go towards the future? So we have these 2 states really well defined, but in between those 2 states is this invitation to move into You know, move past a threshold, open a door, step over something into something that is different, and that's what we're going to be exploring.
