What Does it Mean to be in Liminal Space?
3 minute read
Have you ever felt uneasy in an empty stairwell? A deserted airport late at night. A quiet school corridor during the holidays. A hotel hallway, an empty car park, places designed purely for passing through.
These spaces are unsettling not because something is happening, but because nothing is. They exist between destinations, stripped of purpose once movement stops. We recognise them instinctively as in-between places. They are liminal spaces.
But liminality is not just an aesthetic. Long before it became associated with eerie images online, it described something far more fundamental: the experience of transition itself.
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What is liminal space?
The word liminal comes from the Latin limen, meaning threshold. A liminal space is not somewhere you arrive, but something you move through. It is a phase of transition, not a destination.
Anthropologists first used the term to describe rites of passage. Moments when a person leaves one identity behind but has not yet fully assumed another – adolescence, marriage, grief. This middle phase sits between separation and incorporation, a period marked by ambiguity and uncertainty.
Psychologists and organisational theorists later adopted the idea. Liminal space can be experienced temporally, while waiting or becoming. Spatially, in corridors, stairwells and airports. Emotionally, during periods of loss, reorientation or change.
“These spaces are unsettling not because something is happening, but because nothing is. They exist between destinations, stripped of purpose once movement stops. We recognise them instinctively as in-between places.”
Where do we encounter liminal space at work?
In business, liminality is everywhere.
It appears between roles, during restructures, mergers and leadership transitions. It shows up when strategies are rewritten, when old narratives no longer hold, but new ones are not yet clear. Organisations, like people, experience moments when the familiar falls away before the future takes shape.
These periods are often uncomfortable; anxiety may rise. There is a temptation to rush towards certainty, even if it means reverting to what no longer fits.
Why does liminal space feel so unsettling?
Because it resists resolution.
Our brains are wired for predictability. We want to know where we are and where we are going; liminal space offers neither. It asks us to tolerate ambiguity, to sit with questions rather than answers.
Yet this is also where change becomes possible. When the old story loosens its grip, space opens for something new – and perhaps better – to emerge.
How do we learn to stay in the in-between?
The first step is recognising liminality for what it is: a transition, not a failure. This phase is temporary, even if it does not feel that way.
Trying to escape it too quickly often leads to premature decisions or false certainty. Instead, grounding yourself in small, familiar routines can provide stability while the larger picture remains unclear.
For leaders and organisations, the challenge is not to eliminate liminal space, but to hold it well. To resist the urge to rush meaning into place. To listen closely to what no longer fits, and to stay curious about what might.
The in-between is uncomfortable precisely because it strips away certainty. But it is also where new identities, strategies and stories begin.
“Grounding yourself in small, familiar routines can provide stability while the larger picture remains unclear.”
Further Reading
- The Rites of Passage, Arnold van Gennep
- Transitions, William Bridges
- r/LiminalSpace
- The Pleasant Head Trip of Liminal Spaces, The New Yorker
