Liminal Leader webinar

So welcome everyone to this webinar about the liminal leader. And I've had so much fun putting this together because it was a concept that I've kind of been playing around with trying to articulate. And when I found the wording, I thought, ah, everything starts to fall in place. But it's been really interesting also seeing people's reactions to the concept. And Anne, I think you're here on the call, Anne wrote a lovely piece on LinkedIn about, you know, how people move through this leadership period of time with this concept. So I hope that this sparks some more ideas for you. And there are also some people who haven't joined us before, so let me just do a little bit of an introduction of myself so that you know who I am and why it is you're spending this 1 hour with me today. So I'm Charlotte Kemp. I am a futurist and a professional speaker. I have been very involved in the speaking world, kind of behind the scenes in leadership roles. And that's very interesting as a leader in associations because you're always taking from one person's work and then handing it on to somebody else. And this particular photograph is really precious to me. I was speaking, I was president of the Global Speakers Federation a few years back, and I was in Australia at this particular time. And there is an event that we have there called Professional Speakers Celebration Day. That's what that orange thing is about at the bottom. But on either side of me are 2 of my closest and best friends, Nirja Singh, who is now the current president of the Global Speakers Federation, and Joni Peddie from South Africa as well, and she is the president-elect of GSF. And I just think it's amazing that there are 3 women in a row there who've held this or will be holding this particular leadership position. But also knowing who they are and their different characteristics and what they bring to the role. I've been very aware of how we pass on that responsibility as a leader from one person to another. That doesn't always happen in commercial spaces, or maybe in the roles that you have, but it's worth bearing in mind that whatever we are leading, whatever we are taking care of, isn't necessarily always ours to own forever. It is a transition of responsibility. So I find that to be quite, quite an interesting concept there. But I love speaking about futures thinking and about other ideas, and I've wanted to explore this particular subject because as part of a series of books that I want to write about how we at senior leadership levels prepare ourselves and our people for the future, very often a person in leadership has a vision for the future, but they can't always get all their people on board. So maybe we can address some of that. Before we get into some of the real content, I want to just find out if we can agree on certain ideas. And these are the 3 things I'd like to agree on: that there is change, and that this transition period is different, that change is massive at the moment, and that the change does something to our brains. So let's just explore that a little bit more. In this liminal space, it's like that twilight time, you know, the sun is going down, it's not day, but it's not yet night. It's that in-between time. It's beautiful as twilight, but in other places it could be messy, it could be confusing. It's the period between Christmas and New Year's Day, that kind of week where nobody quite knows what day it is or what they're supposed to be doing. And it's like how we feel when we go to an airport and we have a layover in the middle of the night. There's no rules that apply there. It's all different. So this change is happening. When we look at a particular change, so when we look at this, in this case of a chrysalis, we had a caterpillar, it becomes a butterfly, but in that in-between time when it's in this chrysalis, it's a soup. It's a messy soup of things. It's really unpleasant. If you interrupt that process, it will die. It will not actually emerge from, from the chrysalis. What is happening inside of that chrysalis is happening on the inside. We don't see it from the outside. So very often there is change happening, but we're not witnessing it, or we're not quite sure of what is going on, or we're impatient for it to finish. But we have to allow that process to finish. And the other thing is that that change for that particular butterfly is a massive change. If we're the gardener, we're looking at a tree full of these chrysalises, and it's just, you know, we've come to expect it. It's not that big a change for us. We're just witnessing this as we carry on with the rest of our garden work. So sometimes a huge shift happens in a private place, and we don't always see that, or we can't explain that to other people. And that's part of the liminality, the space in between, is what are we witnessing and what aren't we witnessing? what is hidden from us. And then the other thing I want to explore is the fact that change creates chemical reactions in our brains. Massive change happens, and at the moment— and I'm not going to insult your intelligence by listing all of the things that are happening— but we have these PESTLE drivers of change: politics, economics, social, technology, legislation, environment. These huge changes that happen, and at the moment, at this point in time, there are so many of those changes happening in so many different places and parts of the world. And because of social media, we're exposed to a lot more now than we have been before. There's also way more people on the planet than there were before, so there's more change happening. When that happens, it causes reactions in our brains. How much exposure we have to good news or bad news, how much of the bad news in the world we pay attention to that could cause us distress. In our brains, all those chemical reactions that happen, the brain can't quite tell whether this is scary and threatening or exciting. And we can tell the story to our brains that changes that. And that story is really important. How we frame the change that is happening around us, or the change that we're responsible for, or the change we need to respond to, How we tell ourselves that story and how we tell other people determines how we're going to react. Are we trying to react in fear and protect ourselves? Are we trying to future-proof ourselves so that nothing can hurt us? Or are we more open to these changes so we're trying to be flexible and responsive? We become future-fit. I have 2 friends. I have more friends, but these particular 2 friends, one is disappointed that she's not going to live long enough. to see the fruition of so many positive changes she sees in the world. She is so excited about what is happening. The other friend literally closes her eyes, covers her ears. She doesn't want to know anymore. She just knows what she can do, but everything else is threatening to her. And that's just because of the story that each of them are telling themselves. So those are the 3 agreements. In the chat box, let me know if you like change, if you love it, or if you don't. or if you disagree with, with any of these very basic statements, there is change, there is massive change, and it's doing something to our brains. And we as leaders need to understand what that is so we can find ways to respond to it. Now, when I put this webinar together, there were 3 things that I wanted to address in terms of liminal leadership, and I'd like to make these promises to you so that we can kind of unpack the rest of the content. The first one is that we want to— beg your pardon— we want to learn how to notice emerging signals of change. How do we pay attention to this? What is, what is the secret or the trick to that? The second thing we want to explore is how do we hold multiple potential futures in our brains at the same time without going crazy? What is the mechanism for that? And the third thing is, how do we as leaders develop a future-oriented voice? And my voice is going to get lost in a moment. Just hold on. For my speaker friends, I promise that I warmed my voice up this morning, but it doesn't seem to have helped. Alright, so How do we notice those emerging signals? How do we hold potential multiple futures? And how do we develop a future-oriented voice or practice or response to the future? 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 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, whether 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 Genep. In the early 1900s, he wrote a book in French about— 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 a human, we move from one state to another. And in many cultures, there are good rituals that help us to navigate those spaces, to acknowledge them, to pause. When a baby is born and comes 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. But first, I'm going to introduce you to another concept entirely, and this is only about my own kind of special interest that I have, is about surrealism. Because while I was playing around with liminality, especially with modern artistic expressions of liminal spaces, every time I looked at these modern pictures and illustrations and drawings and computer-generated art, it felt a little surreal to me. So I went back and played with the concepts of surrealism and actual liminality, and it comes together. So this particular image is of a famous painting by René Magritte, who is a— was a surrealist painter. He explored a whole load of different concepts, very simple, interesting images. This particular one is titled— they're in French, I'm not going to even dare to pronounce that— but the English title is This Is Not a Pipe. And that juxtaposition of a statement saying this is not a pipe when you're looking at a picture of a pipe is the point of creating this discomfort in our brains, this kind of like this little clash, this contradiction going, but it is a pipe. How can the title say this is not a pipe? The alternate title of this particular piece is called The Treachery of Images. Because that is not a pipe. It is an image of a pipe, a painting of a pipe. And that's the kind of thing that we— it's small, but it's the kind of thing that we need to play around with to explore a world that feels a little surreal right now, when there are these contradictions, when we have laws that say one thing but actions that are completely different. When it's a surreal time, it really is. Surrealism uses dreams and those unexpected juxtapositions, chance encounters, altered perception, irrational concepts, and also the dream state. It uses all of those concepts to get us to pause and think. And that is what we need to do as futurists, is we need to pause and think about what it is we're exploring. So liminality looks at this threshold and surrealism plays around on the threshold and says, what else can we do? Modern surrealism, often explores these spaces of empty spaces, empty school rooms, empty airports, things where you feel like you recognize it, but you feel like there's something slightly off, empty hallways and abandoned buildings. That's what modern surrealism is playing around with. So that's what we're going to explore, the liminality and the surreal nature of the current world. But let's dive into the actual 3 promises that we're going to be looking at. And the first one is how to notice emerging signals. Now, in the futures thinking world, and this is why I love this space, there are lots of tools. And you can quite nerd out on all of the different tools and models and frameworks that are there. We have a whole lot from before when we just had, like, you know, business management science. But now there's a whole lot more in terms of the tools actually designed for futures thinking or strategic foresight. And dare I say, I have created a few models of my own. There's a book that is like almost ready. It's in that liminal state between being completely written but not yet edited and put together. So like that last 2% takes longer than everything else to get the book published, but any minute now. But I've got this book that I've kind of dived into each one of those different tools to explain what they are. Well, not all of them, but the ones that I liked. And that book will be ready soon. Towards the end of October when I have my next Sandbox meeting. The Sandbox is a place where coaches, consultants, um, some speaker friends, we get together and we play in the sandbox. We play with these different tools to explore, uh, what they mean for us, for our practice, for the, the work that we're doing with our clients, uh, with people we're coaching. Um, how do we use these futures tools? What tools do we have from our own practice that can be enhanced with these insights. So if you are in that category of people who want to play around and explore those, then I'll send you some more information later about the sandbox, or we can run sandboxes for other companies and organizations as well. But having said all of that, there are these great tools. I love them. I'll share one with you just now in the second part. But rather than looking at the tools, If you want to identify the signals, there are tools that can do that. But the first thing you need to do before relying on an external tool or model is to learn how to pay attention, to be aware of discomfort, because discomfort is that indication that something is happening that is not what we expected. If you go to work Monday to Friday and everything works and the traffic is fine and, you know, all of your KPIs are met and all of your turnaround times are met, it's a good, nice, smooth week. It's nice. You might feel relieved, you know, by the weekend, but too much of that, you're going to get bored. Most people would. But when something happens to disrupt that really smooth process, that's when you go, what happened here? Do we have a process that is wrong? Have we not met a customer expectation? Is something changing with technology? Technology. There's a discomfort there, something that we very often try and gloss over or fix very quickly or smooth away because we don't like discomfort. But as a futurist leader, as a liminal leader, one of your first things that you need to learn how to do is to sit with that discomfort for a while. Like when the speaker doesn't speak for too long and there's a pause. We need to sit in that space of being uncomfortable and not try and fix it. It's like we've had some people who've passed away recently, and you want to go and fix things. You want to go and comfort them. You want to get them to move quickly through this grieving process to the other side. But that grief is a transition period, and we have to go through it. Just like the caterpillar has to go through the chrysalis stage, we have to go through it to emerge on the other side. We cannot shortcut. certain things that need to happen because then we kind of, we bury it, we suppress it rather than actually deal with it. So there's a lot, there's a lot of value in sitting with the discomfort and not as a leader rushing to fix it or replace it with something new because it's not, it's not going to help. When we look at the futures world, um, when a company is dealing with discomfort, what we very often do is we go and say, let's get a report, let's get a trend report or a trend analysis, let's get more data, let's fix this. But sometimes you just have to spend some time going, what doesn't work anymore? What do we need to put aside so that we can actually move forward? Because if we, if we move too quickly, if we, if we ground ourselves too quickly and choose a path then we've resolved something, but we've lost information. We've lost the opportunity to explore why the old doesn't work anymore. What is it that— what is a component of the old model that we need to get rid of? We're not going to get rid of everything, but we can't resolve that if we just quickly make a decision and move past. We also lose possibilities. Um, the the existing structure, if we're trying to imagine the future, we imagine the future from the perspective that we have, the structure that we're in. It takes a lot for us to kind of ignore that structure and really truly imagine an alternative future. When we are in this liminal, uncomfortable place and we try and say, okay, this model isn't working, let's quickly get another one, we've lost the possibility of using that time to really imagine something that is completely and utterly different. That's what the possibility is. So during liminality, old structures lose, temporarily lose their authority. They don't work anymore. It's like, you know, being on that layover at the airport. There are certain things that you do as a human being, like, you know, certain times that you would drink alcohol or have breakfast, but if you're at a layover, in an airport. It doesn't matter what time it is because it's not the time where you were before and it's not the time that it is at home. And you can have breakfast for supper, you can have a drink at 9 o'clock in the morning, it doesn't matter because it's an airport layover. So we lose those possibilities to kind of imagine those new futures. So don't rush that. And we also lose the chance to unlearn. And there are things that we need to abandon, to put away. as we move forward. So the period of discomfort or disorder allows us that opportunity to unlearn things and put them away and grab something new, and that is the value of the discomfort. So I know it's kind of an odd response, but how we actually notice emergent signals is not going to be about the tools. First of all, it's going to be about that emotional response and that cognitive realization that something is wrong, different, uncomfortable, and that discomfort is where we're going to learn the most for ourselves and for our teams. So the second thing we're going to explore is how to hold multiple potential futures in our brains at the same time. The old structures that we have, the world that we worked in, the way a lot of people still wish the world worked in or pretend that the world is this way. We have certainty, we have known facts, we have a strategy that we're trying to execute on, and we have the experience of the past, and all of that should allow us to make good decisions about the future. It doesn't. because of all of the change that is happening, because of the nature of the change and the pace of the change. So what we're experiencing instead is uncertainty. There's so many unknowns. Rather than strategy, we have to actually explore possibility, and rather experience, we have to actually develop imagination. And corporate boards aren't big fans of possibility and imagination. It's like, no, where's— where are the facts and the reports? In the data. So we need to, we need to kind of embrace these ideas and learn how to use them as leaders. This leans heavily obviously on the concepts of VUCA, which is about— it's an acronym to describe the world as volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous. There's BANI, which is brittle, anxious, nonlinear, and incomprehensible. There's TUNA, which is turbulent, uncertain, novel, and ambiguous. There's a whole lot of others as well. I made up one as well, but it spells out a swear word, so you'll have to ask me for that in private. Our brains crave certainty. We need that relief. We need to come back to something. Our brains are designed to keep us safe, not to keep us happy or entertained, not for the best outcome in the future, but to keep us safe in the immediate. So we crave that certainty. We want to know what happens, but we have to actually be able to think about things that are different, that are alternative. So here is the model that I would like to invite you to consider. And if you happen to have a notepad with you right now, then sketch out these 3. And as we're going through, just think about a situation that you're dealing with in your personal life or in your work life and look at these 3 scenarios. So the 3 scenarios are this. In the middle, we got the middle of the road, the thing we expect, the the strategy document as it stands, the business plan as it stands. Then we have a utopian version where everything goes perfectly. Beg your pardon. So we got a path there in the middle which is meandering, but we know kind of where we're going. The utopian path, everything moves smoothly and it's automated and electronic. And on the right-hand side is the dystopian path where there's lots of danger, where there's lots of going backwards and forwards. Now I know my audience, there are some of you who are thinking that those 2 should be the other way around because you much prefer a winding path that looks exciting, that is natural, than something that is too electronic and modern. But just play with me for this because these are my scenarios. You can make up your own scenarios later. So once you have these 3 scenarios, you can start to play around with them and explore them in different ways. So here's what we have. The middle path is what we have planned. The utopian path is, what if everything is perfect? Everything just works brilliantly. It's wonderful. As you start thinking like that, your brain is producing chemicals which you, you need to deal with, okay? Because you can't make a decision during this chemical cascade. But that's the utopian path. The dystopian path is, what if everything goes wrong? What if this year something happens that's worse than COVID. How do you deal with that? And if you spend any time doing that, then immediately your brain starts to feel that anxiety because it feels threatened. It doesn't know that you're playing a game. It doesn't know that you're imagining this. It thinks that the threat is real. Allow yourself to experience that, to go through that, so that you can make some more rational decisions on the other side of your brain's chemistry. So here's one that, that I, I often use because it's, it's so personal that it helps us to kind of imagine it. What if you, you went to the doctor and you got some blood tests? Because it's, you know, just regular annual checkup. You get some blood tests and there's blood pressure results and cholesterol and, you know, all the other things. That is data. It's just you've gathered it. But you go for your annual checkup again next year, and all of a sudden the results are different. The doctor says, no, listen, your cholesterol is way up, your blood pressure is way up, this is a problem. Now you need to start doing certain things. So now that flag is indicating the data, comparing one set of data to another set, is saying there is something wrong here, you need to do something, you need to take action, because the consequences of not taking action are these dire consequences. So you take action. For example, your husband makes you a salad every second day. For four months, and then you go to the doctor and you take some more blood tests, and they go, "Wow, brilliant! Your results are much better. Let's keep that up." So now you've got data. You're comparing actual results, and those flags indicate which direction you're going in, which actions you need to take care of, what things are urgently like an emergency that you need to respond to, what other things can you address over time. and kind of change in a different direction. So the scenario process allows you to develop those flags so that you can have a conversation around it, and you and your team can know, or you and your doctor, or you and your family can know which direction you need to move in. There's another one. Let's just look at sales figures. You look at last year's data, you look at your hopes and dreams, and you create a budget. You've got a set of data, something to measure against, and then all of a sudden, you look at your sales figures and, and they're not working. Um, your sales are down, your expenses up. There's suddenly tariffs, there's a war, your supply chain is interrupted, and the, the flags that you're seeing— the declining sales, the increasing expenses— those flags are telling you a direction that you're going in, and this is a problem for your business. You need to take some kind of action. Or maybe something that you do is brilliant. It's, oh, people just love you. You're going viral. You're flavor of the month. Everybody wants to buy you, and money is pouring in, and your expenses are fine, and now you're thinking, time to buy that fancy new car. So you can take action based on the indicators of those flags. Those aren't the only ways to name them. I always start with that, you know, your middle of the road, your utopian, and dystopian. But you could have other names. And to my futurist colleagues here, just cut me a little slack because I'm going to play around a little bit here with some of the words. But it's just for us to get an idea of how we can use scenarios. So the middle of the road is our projected future, where we think we're going, where we kind of like planning to go there. Our utopian could be our preferred future. We're going in this direction. We would much prefer to go in that direction. What do we need to change now, today, to go in that other direction? Who do we need to get on board? What skills do we need to learn? What competencies do we need to develop so we can get closer to our preferred future and much, much further away from the future we're trying to avoid? Way back in South Africa's history, and it's Heritage Day today, so you South Africans who are here, thank you very much for spending this time with me. But Heritage Day marks some, some pretty significant historical events, but also the different cultures and heritage we have as a country. And for me, one of the most important parts of that were the futures work that was done in South Africa at the political level and between the different political parties prior to apartheid ending and the first democratic elections in 1994. And one of the sets of scenarios that were developed was called the South African Montefiore Scenarios. It was a place called Montfleur. There's actually 4, but the way I looked at it was this one. The middle of the road is this lame duck. We're going to do certain things, but we can't actually make any progress. We just kind of waddle along. The flight of the flamingos was this positive version. You know, if we could get the politics right, if we could get the governance right, if we can get the people together, we're going to choose the high road. That's where we want South Africa to go. But if we don't get it right, If we bury our heads in the sand, if, if, if we hold on to, to past hurts, if we keep resisting each other, we're going to end up in this, in this negative place. So you've got those alternative phrases that you can explore. So my invitation to you, when I finish this, you can grab a quick screenshot of it. I will send information and a link to the recording afterwards, but If you want to create your own set of scenarios, these are the 4 steps, very easy to do. Identify 3 potential futures. So whatever is the problem you're dealing with, identify 3 potential futures: middle, good, bad. Then describe and name them. Describe what the world looks like in that situation. You know, if your blood pressure results and your cholesterol results are bad, how are you going to feel physically? What energy are you going to have? You know, What medication are you going to need? You describe that world. Do you want to live like that, that you can't get down on the floor and play with your grandchildren? Or alternatively, another picture is of health and robustness and movement and enjoying life. And once you paint the characteristics of those worlds, then it's easier to respond to them because now you've defined their characteristics and you can start using those stories for decision-making. So you and your team can talk about if the world looks like this, we're going to have to do X, Y, and Z. We're going to have to bring in more people, or we're going to have to retrain people, or we are not going to be able to run that project because we just don't have the resources. So now you can start to make decisions based on 3 different pictures of the future that you're all holding in your minds at the same time, because now they're 3 stories and they're not just a random collection of unknowns. So I think scenario planning— there's a lot of work that goes into deep research with scenarios, but we can also find easier accessible ways of doing it. You just grab a screenshot of that, you can create scenarios for yourself within an hour of this webinar. Just wait till I'm finished, but you can create your own scenarios. You can actually make decisions based off of them, and that's the value of these particular tools. All right, 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, 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 like trapped in there. But there's, you know, 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, you know, 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 2-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. 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 just 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 try 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, 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. And if you're looking for something for your team, I have a workshop that I run called Developing Your Thinking Fit for the Future. And I've mentioned already that we can't future-proof ourselves, and it's a phrase people use all the time, but it kind of annoys me. If it's raining and you put on a waterproof rain jacket, you're protecting yourself from the rain, you're repelling the rain, because you, you don't want to get wet. When you are future-proofing yourself, you're trying to, to get the competencies or the tools or the knowledge so that you are ready, so that the future cannot disrupt you. And it's the wrong mindset because you will never be able to do that. You will never be able to anticipate every kind of disruption. Much better to go out and play in the rain, to, to embrace the rain, to embrace the future, to embrace the changes, to know that they're not always pleasant, they're not always desired, but you cannot resist or repel or prevent them all from happening, but you can respond to them. And how are you going to respond to them? And that is what it means to be fit for the future. Fit actually stands for developing the foresight to have the insight so that we can manage the transformation required to move into the future. And we do that in this threshold space. When we look back on old folklore and witchcraft, the threshold, the entrance, the mat as you go into a home in particular is really important. In folklore and in witchcraft, you never have a welcome mat because you don't want to welcome everything into your home. You have to protect your home. So some people will protect that entrance, that threshold, with salt, or they'll put a sigil underneath, or they blow cinnamon into the house over the threshold to bring blessings. So there's a lot that you can do around the space to indicate what can come into the threshold space or not. What do you want to have pass over or repel? My husband and I just spent— whoopsie, are we still there? My husband and I just spent 4 months in Vietnam, and one of the things that I loved doing was going on these long walks and finding these lions. It's kind of like an ancient Chinese dog creature. an ancient Chinese dog creature that has kind of been reimagined as a lion, and it's there to protect the threshold, to protect the entrance into buildings. And you almost always see them in pairs. And so I'd walk around and take photographs, and sometimes I'd take a photograph of one like, oh, this was a beautiful example of this lion, and then I'd feel kind of uncomfortable, like, where is his partner? And the one time I'm like, I'm looking up and down this road, and it's a corner corner shop, and I can only see the one lion. And as I walk around the corner, I see his partner on the other side because the 2 of them are there to protect this particular entrance. So it's, it's in lots of different cultures, lots of different ways. We know that this entrance, this threshold, this liminal space is important. And how do we actually navigate it? What are we going to do? We don't always have to cross immediately. Remember, we don't have to resolve our discomfort immediately. We can pause. In that threshold. We can stand there for a minute, and when you're standing there, you're seeing both sides. So what is it that you can see from the threshold that you can't see when you're in one room looking through to the other, or vice versa? What perspective can the threshold give to you? And that's what Janus invites you to do. So when you're thinking as Janus about the past and the future. You're thinking at the same time, what are you letting go and what are you learning at the same time? What are you preserving and what are you replacing? What are you grieving and what are you anticipating? What can you maintain from the past and what do you need to design that is new? And you're doing both those things at the same time. You're saying goodbye to some things and hello to others. Back to Surrealism. Liminality is about that state between 2 states, okay? The space between one thing being something and being something different. Surrealism is looking at different realities, so it pushes it a little bit more, but it actually says, let's play there. Let's intentionally do that. I mean, you're at a doorway here, but on barren land. There's lots of examples of those in Surrealist art. So people enter this transitional state between 2 conditions. Your question is, what becomes possible in that state? What becomes possible because you're now in this liminal stage? And more than that, what can you as a leader do to deliberately enter that space? You're not going to just sit back and wait for it to happen. You're going to want to deliberately enter it. And I'm going to invite you to think about something else. I don't know if you've ever seen this movie series, The Three-Body Problem, or read the book. I've done both and found them fascinating. The Three-Body Problem science fiction story, and basically it's about a planet somewhere else that is in a tri-solar system. So there are 3 suns, and when you've got 3 objects that are interacting, it creates chaos. You never quite know whether all the suns are going to be up or down. Is it going to be— your planet going to be boiling, or is it going to freeze? So the people on this planet go through this series of chaotic periods and stable periods. So in a stable era, they can create, learn, create a government, do science. In a chaotic era, most of the people die, or they're kind of dehydrated and put aside for the next stable era. What you need to do as a leader is to consider this. It's really easy to lead in a stable era. You can look good as a leader in a stable era. It's difficult, challenging to lead in a chaotic era. And sometimes there's actually some studies about it that certain kinds of people are pushed into leadership as they know that the organization is going through a chaotic era. so that they can blame that person for the chaos that has already come before. There's lots of documented stories about how women often get into leadership during a chaotic era so that when things go wrong, they can say, well, women's leadership. Anyway, we won't get into that today. But as a real liminal leader, as a leader who's really looking towards this, you've got kind of 2 jobs depending on where you stand. One is that you're in a stable era, relatively stable era in your organization, but because you're paying attention, you're anticipating the chaos and you're preparing for it. You're preparing yourself, your organization, and your people for the coming chaos. The other way it could be is that you're a leader in a chaotic era, but because you've got the competency that is required, You're able to create a sense of stability for your people. You're able to give a framework of, we haven't resolved everything, but we still know what we can do, that we can still move forward in the space. So you create the sense of comfort for them, a sense of stability, and that's what your leadership is really about. So there we go, 3 premises. Let's see if we fill them. We don't resolve comfort too soon. We need to sit in that discomfort. We can play around with scenarios so that we can hold multiple futures in our brains at the same time, and we can think of ourselves as Janus. And that way we can work out how to speak about the future, how to articulate both what was in the past and what will be in the future, and how we are going to get there. And that is liminal leadership for you.