Liminal thinking

Working Definition

Liminal thinking, as formulated by organizational designer Dave Gray, is the art of creating change by recognizing, suspending, and reframing the tacit beliefs that govern how we and others see the world. Its starting premise is that beliefs are not transparent reflections of reality, but simplified models constructed from a narrow slice of experience, atop which individuals and institutions build self-sealing “bubbles” of what they treat as obvious. The adjective liminal (from the Latin limen, “threshold”) points to the ambiguous zone between two belief structures: only by stepping onto that threshold can a person see their own assumptions as contingent constructions and revise them. In everyday online culture, the word has blurred into the aesthetic of “liminal spaces” (eerie photos of empty hotel corridors and malls), whereas in anthropology (Arnold van Gennep, Victor Turner) liminality designates the sacred middle phase of a rite of passage; Gray borrows the anthropological metaphor and turns it into a portable toolkit for organizational and personal change.

Genesis and Global Lineage

Dave Gray—founder of the visual-thinking consultancy XPLANE and co-author of Gamestorming (2010)—introduced the term in its current form in his 2016 book Liminal Thinking: Create the Change You Want by Changing the Way You Think (Two Waves Books / Rosenfeld Media). Growing out of corporate workshop practice, Gray’s framework translates into accessible visual diagrams the tradition of organizational learning pioneered by Chris Argyris (single-loop versus double-loop learning and “defensive routines”), Donald Schön (reflective practice), Peter Senge (mental models), and Alfred Korzybski’s general semantics (“the map is not the territory”). Gray organizes the book around six principles describing how beliefs work—as selective models built from experience, habits of action, and collective identity shields—and nine practices distilled into three moves: step into your own ignorance, seek understanding of others’ worlds, and disrupt routines by doing something different. Yet the word liminal carries a much older, weightier lineage independent of management consulting: coined by folklorist Arnold van Gennep in Les rites de passage (1909) for the transitional middle phase of initiation rituals, it was rediscovered in the 1960s by anthropologist Victor Turner (Betwixt and Between, 1967; The Ritual Process, 1969) to analyze moments when social hierarchy is temporarily suspended in favor of egalitarian communitas, and later extended into macro-historical political sociology by Árpád Szakolczai and Bjørn Thomassen. Gray rides the evocative aura of that anthropological tradition while repurposing it for everyday problem-solving.

Central European Lineage

The sharpest theoretical counterpoint to Gray’s optimistic view of the threshold comes from the Hungarian-born historical sociologist Árpád Szakolczai (b. 1958), whose early intellectual formation took place in late-socialist Budapest, where he studied and from 1981 to 1995 worked at the Institute of Sociology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences before teaching at the European University Institute in Florence and University College Cork. Drawing on the lived experience of Eastern Europe’s protracted post-1989 transition—reflected in his 1996 working paper In a Permanent State of Transition—Szakolczai argued in Reflexive Historical Sociology (2000), “Liminality and Experience” (2009), and Permanent Liminality and Modernity (2017) that when a liminal crisis phase fails to reach ritual reincorporation, society becomes trapped in permanent liminality: a chronic, pathological condition in which stable norms dissolve, everyday life turns into an exhausting carnival, and charismatic “trickster” demagogues seize power. Where Gray’s American consulting handbook celebrates the threshold as a voluntary creative space of freedom and reframing, Szakolczai’s Budapest-rooted sociology warns that a threshold without an exit is a civilizational nightmare. Although neither author cites the other, reading them side by side exposes the hidden institutional preconditions required for liminality to be generative rather than destructive.

Why Now

Published in 2016 as a modest handbook for product designers and team leaders, Gray’s concept acquired a second life between 2020 and 2026 when liminality ceased to be a metaphor and became a mass collective experience. First, the COVID-19 pandemic plunged hundreds of millions of workers and students into a literal multi-year threshold—shuttered offices, suspended routines, and prolonged uncertainty over whether “normal” would ever return—forcing organizations to question previously untouchable beliefs about remote work and authority. Second, starting around 2019 on 4chan and Reddit before spreading across TikTok and YouTube, the internet aesthetic of liminal spaces and the “Backrooms” mythos (fluorescent-lit empty hallways, deserted airports, transitional non-places) gave a younger generation a shared visual vocabulary for feeling stuck between a vanishing past and an unformed future. Third, in debates over the polycrisis, climate transition, and generative AI disruption, coaches, educators, and facilitators increasingly reach for “liminal thinking” to describe the psychological skill required when legacy professional playbooks stop working before new institutions have crystallized.

Explanatory Power

Gray’s framework makes visible that the most intractable conflicts in organizations, politics, and families are rarely disputes over raw facts; they are collisions between two self-consistent “pyramids of belief” constructed from different slices of lived experience. First, it explains why cross-functional corporate teams talk past each other over “obvious” priorities: sales, engineering, and legal teams attend to different environmental signals, validate different metrics, and inhabit separate occupational thought bubbles, so throwing more data at the table without surfacing the underlying experiential selection rules changes nothing. Second, it clarifies why well-designed policy or organizational reforms routinely fail: when a new rule threatens a belief that has fused with a group’s professional identity and self-worth, the belief acts as a self-defending immune system, rationalizing away inconvenient evidence. Third, it explains why an outsider or newcomer often spots a simple solution that thirty-year veterans missed—not because the outsider is smarter, but because standing on the threshold between two communities lets them see the veterans’ “reality” as one map among others.

Axes of Debate

Underappreciated Angle

The most subversive—and most routinely ignored—feature of Gray’s book is its ethics of symmetry on the threshold. Most managers, consultants, and activists pick up Liminal Thinking hoping to learn a persuasion technique: a clever method for dismantling other people’s stubborn beliefs so they will finally adopt our plan. Yet the internal logic of Gray’s practices—beginning with “assume you are not objective,” “empty your cup,” and “create safe spaces”—demands the exact opposite: you cannot invite another person onto the threshold between two worldviews unless you are genuinely willing to suspend your own certainty and risk having your mind changed first. That requirement places genuine liminal thinking much closer to physicist David Bohm’s practice of open dialogue or Chris Argyris’s mutual double-loop inquiry than to corporate change-management playbooks. Equally neglected is the question of duration: as Victor Turner’s anthropology reminds us, traditional societies surrounded the liminal phase with strict temporal boundaries and reintegration rituals precisely because they knew that human beings cannot endure standing on a threshold forever.