The space in between

A programme comes to an end. The last report has gone out, the board has signed off the review and the participants have said goodbye. The new plan is with a foundation, but the grant has not come through yet. The team still comes in every day. Nobody quite knows what they are working on.

Anyone who has worked in an organisation long enough knows a time like this. The old is over and the new has not arrived. Anthropologists call it a liminal space, from the Latin limen: threshold. We call it the space in between. This story is about that space, and about what you do with it.

The word comes from anthropology. In 1909 Arnold van Gennep described how rites of passage take the same shape all over the world. First you leave behind what you were. Then you stand on the threshold for a while. After that you are taken into something new. He called the middle phase the margin.

Victor Turner took the idea further in the 1960s. People on the threshold are no longer one thing and not yet the other, he wrote. The usual rules are on hold for a while. That makes the time uncertain, but also fertile. It is exactly there that something new can begin.

So a space in between is not a corridor to hurry through. It is a place of its own, with work of its own.

In 1991 William Bridges applied the idea to organisations. A change is a decision, he wrote, but a transition happens inside people. Between the end of the old and the start of the new lies what he called the neutral zone. There the old has gone and the new is not quite real yet.

In impact work you meet that zone often. A funder changes strategy, and your programme no longer fits. Two foundations merge. You write a new theory of change, but the old indicators still run in every system. Or a grant stops, and the next application has not been assessed.

At a moment like that, you want to fill the void as fast as you can. With a new plan, a new dashboard, a new set of figures. That is understandable. An empty space feels like a mistake, especially in a sector used to accounting for everything.

But fill the space in between too quickly and you often bring the old along without noticing. You pick the same indicators, because they are already in the system. You measure what you always measured, because the report is due. The new plan looks different, but it works the same.

In 1959 the architect Aldo van Eyck spoke about the in-between: the place between inside and outside, between house and street. He thought you should not tidy that place away, but give it shape. A threshold, to him, was a place where you can stand for a moment. The same holds for an organisation.

So what do you do instead? You do not have to stop measuring. You simply measure something else. In the space in between, results matter less and what you notice matters more.

A few things often help, such as these.

• Keep a log. Write down what you see, what surprises you and what you no longer understand. Later it will be your best source.
• Ask participants what is changing for them. They often notice it before the team does.
• Look at which old indicators you really miss. Those belong in the new plan; the rest can go.
• For every figure you still report, note where it comes from and which plan it was once meant for.

That way something new grows in the space in between, point by point. It is not a copy of the old web, nor a plan on its own. It is tied to what was already there, and it fits what you know now.

A space in between also asks something of those who give money. A foundation that wants new figures every month pushes an organisation back to the old. A funder that makes trust-based grants buys time for learning. That can start small. With a report that is allowed to say something is not clear yet, or with a conversation instead of a form.

A network can help too. Anyone in a transition gains a lot from others who have just been through one. An event for members who all stand on a threshold sometimes achieves more than a new handbook.

The space in between always passes. The web grows back. The only question is what grows in it: the old pattern, or something you learned along the way.