How to Lead When You Don't Know Where You're Going: Leading in a Liminal Season

by Susan Beaumont

Liminality refers to a quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs during transition, when a person or group of people is in between something that has ended and something else that is not yet ready to begin. Transition experiences follow a predictable pattern that involves separation, liminality, and reorientation.

The success of any leadership intervention rests upon the quality of the leader’s attention to all that is unfolding—on her or his ability to remain non-anxious, to be self-reflective, and to self-differentiate personal issues from the issues of the organization.

The natural human response is to resist liminality and to strive backward to the old familiar identity, or forward to the unknown identity. The ambiguity and disorientation are at times so heightened that the very work required to move forward becomes impossible to engage.

Clearly, God works with liminality. Through liminal experiences human beings are transformed and brought into deeper relationship with God.

Our resistance stems from the fact that liminality always begins with an ending, an experience of loss. And humankind resists loss. We also resist the unknowing inherent in “not yet”—the loss of control over our own destiny.

And we are tired. It is exhausting trying to keep the old structures intact, managing the anxiety of the transition, and making space for the birth of the new thing—all at the same time.

The primary work in leading people through the liminal phase is to normalize the experience and to frame/define the season as acceptable and even desirable.

Viktor Frankl, an Austrian psychiatrist and survivor of the Holocaust, is often credited with this famous quote, “Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”[3]

people respect a leader who offers knowledge without holding tightly to what is known. People respect a leader who has the courage to acknowledge when a challenge deserves more than an easy platitude or a pretend solution. People respect the leader who says, “I really don’t know the answer, but I’m willing to stand here with you in the anxiety of our mutual not knowing.”

Congregations today need to surrender to the realities of decline and stagnation. We need to quit fighting our liminal reality, as if this is something that we can ward off by striving harder at what we know how to do. By saying yes to what is, we can align ourselves with a future that needs and wants to emerge through us.

The soul is an agent of the divine spark in the institution. The soul is the authentic and truest self of the institution; the source of its divine calling, character, and destiny; the protector of institutional integrity.

Ruth Haley Barton defines discernment as an ever-increasing capacity to “see” the work of God in the midst of the human situation, so that we can align ourselves with whatever God is doing. Discernment is a quality of attentiveness to God that, over time, develops our sense of God’s heart and purpose in the moment.

Danny Morris and Chuck Olsen write, “To discern is to see through to the essence of a matter. Discernment distinguishes the real from the phony, the true from the false, the good from the evil, and the path toward God from the path away from God.”[2]

I have also come to appreciate that people have little capacity for stillness. The practice of sitting quietly with God is foreign to most. Leaders cannot be good discerners if they are not comfortable with stillness.

have also come to appreciate that people have little capacity for stillness. The practice of sitting quietly with God is foreign to most. Leaders cannot be good discerners if they are not comfortable with stillness.

A discernment process takes more time, energy, and intentionality than a decision-making process. Not all issues are significant enough to warrant this careful form of deliberation. However, when the issue is important or potentially polarizing, or requires significant buy-in, the process outlined here can be worth the investment.

In the absence of meaning and purpose, people become fearful. Fearful people will attach themselves to anyone who promises to reduce their anxiety. Often, this involves attachment to one who promises a return to the past—a promise to restore the glory days of the institution, without thinking critically about the ills of that era. Unhelpful attachments to the past do not serve an organization well. These attachments merely deny the conditions that gave birth to liminality and they prolong disorientation.

I have never seen a church grow simply because members wished for growth. Truthfully, most growth aspirations stem from constituents wanting more people, just like themselves, to help support the budget and existing programming. I have only seen churches actually grow in response to the pursuit of authentic ministry that served a contextual need. Chasing growth for the sake of growth is a knee-jerk reaction that lets a congregation avoid the hard work of clarifying identity, context, and values. It compels leaders to jump on everyone else’s bandwagon, chasing flavor-of-the-month programs that worked well elsewhere, but may have little to offer this institution.

In a liminal season, the only way forward is through the uncertainty and chaos. The leader’s challenge is not to eliminate the ambiguity and chaos, but to embrace emergence—and stand with people during their confusion.

Emergence is not a controlled process that can be led by an authority figure. It is a self-organizing process that feeds on experimentation, risk-taking, and learning from failure. It is messy and anxiety producing. Emergence doesn’t happen through the clearly articulated vision of a leader, followed by the careful execution of goals and action plans. In fact, these traditional leadership activities may very well squelch emergence.

A leader who is invested in knowing, advocating, and striving will have difficulty embracing emergence. The leader who practices unknowing, attending, and surrender will rest more productively into the cycle.

Innovation rarely emerges from the center of an organization, from the core group of authority figures who are thinking and acting on behalf of the whole organization. Rather, innovative thinking generally emerges from the edges of the organization, among those who are thinking differently about the challenges, and those who are not encumbered with daily decision-making.

We have been conditioned to think of the decline of an organization as a failure, rather than as a naturally occurring season in the cycle of emergence. Our effectiveness as leaders is not determined by whether an organization grows on our watch. Our effectiveness will ultimately be judged by the extent to which we attend to disorientation, embrace disruption, support innovation, and nurture coherence.