Many leadership models assume movement from one stable state to another: a strategy is set, a change is announced, and a future state is defined. Leadership, in this view, is about accelerating progress toward clarity.
Yet, this assumption no longer aligns with organizational reality.
Across sectors, leaders are operating in what can only be described as a prolonged state of transition where familiar structures are rapidly becoming archaic. Authority is less secure, expertise is being reshaped by technology, and identities are in a state of flux. This is a defining condition of modern leadership, and there are models from the past, present, and future thought leaders that I believe, when brought together, can provide a framework for this new reality.
Anthropology, psychology, and contemporary research converge on a single insight. The practice of leadership today is increasingly liminal: adaptive, relational, and emergent.
Transition Is Psychological, Not Structural: William Bridges and the Inner Experience of Change
William Bridges’ research remains foundational because it explains something organizations often underestimate: change is situational, but transition is psychological.
Bridges distinguished external change from internal transition and showed that people move through psychological phases that can be summarized as:
- Endings and letting go
- Confusion and Creativity
- New beginnings
The presence of transition is nothing new, but its duration in today’s leadership context is very prolonged. Digital transformation, AI adoption, shifting business models, and evolving social expectations repeatedly restart the transition cycle before resolution occurs.
Research on leader identity development supports this insight. Studies show that executives often experience uncertainty and diminished confidence not because they lack competence, but because their former sources of authority and expertise are no longer sufficient.
Leadership failure in prolonged transition is about unacknowledged identity disruption.
Liminality and the Erosion of Structure: Victor Turner and the Social Dynamics of the In-Between
Anthropologist Victor Turner studied rites of passage and identified liminality as the phase in which individuals and groups exist between identities. In liminal states:
- Hierarchies lose legitimacy
- Roles become ambiguous
- Normal rules are suspended
- New forms of connection and meaning emerge
Turner emphasized that liminality, while it may look like disorder, is in fact transformation without a script.
Modern organizations increasingly mirror these conditions. Networked teams, hybrid work, and algorithmic decision-making have weakened the structural foundations that once stabilized authority. Leaders still carry responsibility, but the social systems that once reinforced their role have shifted.
Turner’s work provides a social explanation for why leadership now requires influence, sensemaking, and legitimacy-building as leading with liminal authority increases.
Adaptive Leadership and the Discipline of Not Knowing: Ronald Heifetz and Leadership Without Answers
Ronald Heifetz’s research on adaptive leadership explains what leaders must do in liminal conditions.
Adaptive challenges demand shifts in values, changes in roles, and new ways of interpreting reality. No single authority figure can resolve these challenges alone; in my experience working with senior leaders, attempts to impose certainty too quickly often undermine adaptation and stifle the emergence of collective insight.
Heifetz demonstrated that effective leadership in adaptive contexts involves:
- Harnessing and Regulating Collective Distress
- Maintaining productive tension
- Protecting dissent and redirecting into experimentation
- Resisting the pressure to give the answer
This aligns with contemporary complexity leadership research, which shows that leadership emerges through interaction and learning in what scholars call adaptive space or the realm between old and new systems.
Contemporary Research: Leadership as Becoming
Modern leadership scholarship builds directly on these foundations.
Herminia Ibarra’s research on leader identity shows that leadership development occurs through experimentation in transitional roles rather than through linear progression. Leaders shape their way into new identities even before a role is fully distinguished.
Complexity leadership theorists such as Mary Uhl-Bien and Russ Marion demonstrate that adaptive capacity arises from tension between stability and disruption, and it is much harder to develop in a balanced organizational state.
Recent leadership development research explicitly uses the language of liminality to describe executive growth, positioning the in-between state as the primary site of learning.
This time is ripe with opportunity for those willing to step fully into this space.
A Working Model: Liminal Leadership
Taken together, this research suggests a coherent leadership model:
- Bridges explains the psychological experience of transition
- Turner explains the social breakdown and reformation of structure
- Heifetz explains the practice of leadership under adaptive pressure
Executive Definition
Liminal leadership is the capacity to hold psychological transition, social ambiguity, and adaptive tension long enough for new identity, creative authority, and sustained capability to emerge.
Leadership in this space demonstrates disciplined restraint in the face of pressure for premature certainty.
The critical leadership awareness today is that leading through prolonged states of transition is the work! All of the research shared in this article has a common theme. Leaders who can lead through the liminal space without rushing closure or retreating into control create the conditions for genuine adaptation, which is generative and life-giving to the people and organizations they lead.
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