The Liminal Space Where Real Innovation Happens

You know that uncomfortable feeling you get in the middle of creating something new? That moment where you don't quite know what you're building yet. You know the problem you're solving. You've got some ideas. But the final form isn't clear. The path forward isn't obvious. And everyone around you is getting antsy because they want certainty.

That discomfort you're feeling? That's not a problem. That's the actual work. That's where innovation lives.

Natalja Laurey, an anthropologist, ethnographer, and innovation strategist, has spent years studying this in-between space. She embedded herself at Fjord, one of the world's leading design and innovation consultancies, to understand how designers and innovators navigate uncertainty and create novelty. What she discovered is something most innovation frameworks completely miss: The space between the old way and the new way is a sacred space. And the people who are good at navigating it have a very specific set of skills.

When I talked with her, what struck me most wasn't the academic framework (though it's fascinating). It was her insight that this in-between state—what anthropologists call "liminality"—is something designers are uniquely skilled at managing. And if you understand what makes them good at it, you can become better at navigating that space yourself.

The Liminal State: Neither Here Nor There

Liminality comes from the Latin word "limen," which means threshold. It describes the middle part of a rite of passage—the moment when you're no longer who you were, but you haven't yet become who you'll be. A teenager is in a liminal state between childhood and adulthood. A caterpillar in a cocoon is in a liminal state between caterpillar and butterfly.

Innovation is inherently liminal. You're trying to create something that doesn't exist yet. You're transitioning from the current state (this is how we do things now) to a future state (this is how we'll do things). That transition period—that in-between—is where all the actual work happens.

And it's fucking terrifying.

Because in the liminal state, nothing is certain. You don't know what you're building. You don't know if it will work. You don't know if people will want it. You don't know how much it will cost or how long it will take. You're literally operating without the information you want to make a decision.

Most people's instinct is to flee this state as quickly as possible. They want certainty. They want a plan. They want to know what the outcome will be before they invest in the work.

But you can't innovate your way out of the liminal state. You have to innovate your way through it.

Natalja's insight is that designers—and especially architects—are trained to be comfortable in liminal spaces in a way that most other professionals aren't. They're trained to present unfinished work. To get feedback on things that don't fully exist yet. To sit with ambiguity. To let their thinking evolve as they learn more.

Most engineers and businesspeople are trained to avoid ambiguity. They want clarity. They want to plan. They want to reduce risk. But that training actually makes them worse at innovation, because the biggest opportunities live in ambiguous spaces that nobody's figured out yet.

How Designers Create Safety in Uncertainty

Here's what Natalja discovered at Fjord: Designers don't actually eliminate the anxiety of innovation. What they do is create a social container—a community—that makes the anxiety manageable.

When you're in the middle of creating something, you're vulnerable. Your ideas aren't fully formed. Your thinking might be half-baked. And if you present that half-baked thinking in a normal business context, you get destroyed. Someone will poke a hole in it. Someone will ask a question you can't answer. And you'll feel like you've failed.

But in a design context—in a studio, in a crit, in a workshop—there's a different culture. The understanding is that we're all in this together. We're all exploring the same uncertainty. We're all trying to figure out something new. Your half-baked ideas aren't failures. They're contributions to the collective thinking.

Designers create this safety through what Natalja calls "symbols" and "rituals." The big posters. The post-it notes. The sketches on whiteboards. The fact that you present in front of the group. The fact that everyone gets the same treatment. These aren't accident or decoration. They're deliberately chosen to create a sense of community and equality.

When you're all sitting around the same table looking at sketches on a whiteboard, it's hard to maintain a sense of hierarchy. You're all exploring together. You're all getting feedback. You're all learning.

And that community—that shared sense of "we're all in the liminal space together and we'll help each other figure this out"—that's what makes it possible for people to present unfinished ideas without fear.

Most organizations don't create this kind of container. They create a culture of certainty. Leaders are supposed to know the answers. Your job is to execute against the plan. If you're uncertain, you hide it. You present confidence even when you don't feel it.

And what happens? Innovation doesn't happen. Because you've made it too risky to explore the liminal space. You've made it too risky to say "I don't know yet" or "I'm trying something that might not work."

The Guide's Role: Pushing Without Breaking

One of Natalja's more interesting insights came from thinking about the hero's journey. In most narratives, we focus on the hero—the protagonist overcoming obstacles and transforming. But the hero couldn't make the journey without the guide. Without Obi-Wan or Yoda or the mentor figure who helps them navigate the unknown.

Innovation is the same way. The person or team creating something new is the hero. But they need guides to help them through the liminal space. And the guide's job is delicate: They need to challenge you. Push you beyond your comfort zone. Expose your assumptions. But they can't push so hard that you fall off the cliff.

Natalja describes it as managing the balance between comfort and challenge. Designers are trained to do this. They learn to sit with someone's unfinished work. To ask questions that expose gaps in the thinking. To suggest approaches they haven't considered. But to do it in a way that's fundamentally supportive, not destructive.

Most leaders don't have this skill. They either coddle their teams—telling them everything will be fine, ask questions if you need help—or they push too hard, creating so much pressure that people shut down and stop exploring.

Good guides create a container where people can be challenged and supported at the same time. Where the message is: Your thinking is incomplete right now. Here's what I see as gaps. Here are some things to consider. Let's work through this together.

That's very different from: Your thinking is wrong. You need to fix it. Or: That's great! Don't change anything! Either approach shuts down the real work.

What Anthropology Reveals About Organizational Culture

One of the most useful parts of Natalja's work is her willingness to actually look at what's happening in organizations, rather than assuming what's supposed to be happening.

She spent time at Fjord observing designers. Not interviewing them. Not surveying them. Actually observing them. What she discovered was a very specific culture.

Designers had formal clothes for client meetings and informal clothes for the studio. They celebrated collaboration as a value. They were all somewhat idealistic about creating impact. They spent enormous amounts of time on details that most people wouldn't notice.

But here's what's interesting: These weren't characteristics she found by asking designers "What are your values?" They were characteristics she discovered by sitting in the studio and watching how people actually behaved.

That's the difference between conscious knowledge and unconscious knowledge. People can tell you about their values. But their behavior reveals what they actually value.

And what Natalja found was that designer culture was built around some things that most innovation efforts don't systematically cultivate:

Informal collaboration. Designers don't wait for a meeting. They're constantly showing each other sketches, asking for feedback, bouncing ideas off each other.

Comfort with iteration. They're not attached to their first idea. They'll throw it away if something better emerges. There's no ego investment in the first version.

Purpose-driven motivation. They care whether the work actually matters. It's not just a job. It's not just something that makes money. They want it to create impact.

Willingness to be wrong. This came through most strongly in how they responded to feedback. They didn't take critique personally. They understood that the goal was to make the work better, not to protect the ego of the creator.

Most organizational cultures don't have these characteristics. Most organizations are built around hierarchy, individual achievement, finished work, and job security. So when people from that culture try to do innovation work, they bring all those assumptions with them. They're protective of their ideas. They wait for permission. They don't iterate. They don't share until it's perfect.

And then they wonder why they're bad at innovation.

The Uncomfortable Truth About Organizational Transformation

Here's what Natalja said that stuck with me: You can't transform an organization without addressing culture. And culture is what is ordinary—how people actually behave day to day.

Most organizational change efforts try to change behavior without changing culture. They introduce new processes. New frameworks. New metrics. And nothing changes because the underlying culture hasn't shifted.

If you want your organization to be good at innovation, you can't just announce it. You have to change the everyday practices. You have to make it safe to present unfinished work. You have to create rituals and symbols that reinforce collaboration. You have to reward iteration instead of punishing it. You have to celebrate learning from failure instead of hiding it.

That's uncomfortable because it challenges existing power structures. It makes people who are good at being certain and decisive less valuable. It makes people who are good at exploring and iterating more valuable.

It threatens people's identities and their status in the organization.

Which is why most organizations talk about wanting to innovate but don't actually change the culture enough to make it possible.

Why Being In-Between Is Actually Your Advantage

Natalja described herself as a "liminal being." An anthropologist working in business. An academic working in practice. An ethnographer studying designers. A consultant working within an innovation firm. She exists in the spaces between established disciplines and worlds.

And that in-betweenness is her superpower. It lets her see things that people trapped in a single discipline can't see. It lets her ask questions that seem obvious from outside but are invisible from inside.

If you think about it, the best innovators are always liminal beings. They exist in the spaces between disciplines. Steve Jobs understanding the intersection of technology and humanities. Elon Musk moving between companies and industries. Figma's founders understanding both design and engineering.

These people aren't experts in one narrow domain. They're conversant across multiple domains. And that gives them the ability to see connections and opportunities that narrow specialists miss.

So if you're feeling like you don't quite fit into your organization. Like you're not quite a designer or an engineer or a businessperson but some hybrid of all three. Like you exist in the in-between spaces of disciplines and industries.

That's not a weakness. That's actually an advantage. You have a perspective that people deeper in a single discipline can't have. You can see things they're blind to. You can make connections they can't make.

The key is to lean into that. To embrace the in-betweenness instead of fighting it.

What This Actually Means

If you're leading an innovation effort, your job isn't to eliminate the liminal space. Your job is to create a container where people can navigate it safely. That means:

Build community, not hierarchy. Create an environment where everyone is exploring together. Where status is less important than thinking clearly. Where collaboration is the default.

Create symbols and rituals. Make the exploratory process visible. Use sketches and post-its and physical artifacts. Make it clear that this is a space where unfinished thinking is welcome.

Be a guide, not a director. Your job is to challenge and support at the same time. To push people beyond their comfort zone while making sure they don't fall off the cliff.

Reward iteration and learning. Make it safe to fail. Make it safe to change your mind. Make it safe to throw away work that isn't working and try something different.

Expose culture, don't just announce values. Look at what actually happens day-to-day. What behaviors are actually rewarded? What behaviors are actually punished? That's your real culture, regardless of what you say it is.

Lean into the liminal spaces. The people and ideas that don't fit neatly into existing categories are often where the real opportunities are. Protect them. Invest in them. Let them help you see what you're missing.

The Uncomfortable Work

Here's what Natalja never explicitly said but was always implied: Innovation is about change. And change is uncomfortable. It's threatening. It disrupts the way things have always been.

The liminal space isn't just uncomfortable for individuals. It's uncomfortable for organizations. Because it exposes the fact that the current way of doing things might not be the best way. That we might need to do things differently. That the expertise that got us here might not be the expertise we need going forward.

A lot of organizations say they want innovation. What they actually want is better execution of the current strategy. They want to optimize what's already working. They don't want the fundamental uncertainty and discomfort of true innovation.

But if you're willing to sit in that liminal space, if you're willing to create a culture where people can explore and iterate and fail and learn, if you're willing to be guided through the uncertainty by someone who understands the territory...

That's when real innovation becomes possible.

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Want the Full Story?

If this resonates, listen to Yaniv Corem's full conversation with Natalja Laurey on The School of Innovation podcast. They dive deep into the concept of liminality, ethnography as a tool for understanding organizations, why designers are uniquely skilled at innovation, and what the future of organizational transformation actually looks like.

Because here's the thing: You can read all the innovation frameworks you want. You can attend all the workshops. You can implement the processes. But none of that matters if you haven't created a culture where people can actually tolerate ambiguity, present unfinished thinking, iterate boldly, and be guided through the liminal space by someone who understands the territory.

Designers know this. Anthropologists know this. The question is: Are you willing to learn it?