It was a real “oh $%#!“ moment. There I was, sorting through my inbox and scanning the headlines of various newsletters when a familiar phrase caught my eye. A group of BCG consultants had published a new book called How Change Really Works. Which, as you may recall, is the name of the book I’m currently writing. In a span of seconds, I had a whole range of thoughts and emotions: Sudden panic “Oh $%#!” followed immediately by… Surprising relief “Maybe I don’t have to write this book anymore”...

Any period of meaningful change—including this one right here—is defined by its liminal space. Liminal comes from the Latin limen meaning threshold, the space between what used to be and what will come to be. It’s the uneasy transitional period within a relationship dissolving, an organization merging, a technology emerging, a regime changing. Right now, many of us are living inside several liminal spaces at once. We no longer recognize the world as it was, and we can’t yet see what shape it...

I spent the first half of my career firefighting. Something would break, I’d fix it. Something would break again—usually in exactly the same way—and I’d fix it again. I thought speed was sophistication. I thought certainty was competence. It took me a long time to understand that I wasn’t solving problems; I was managing the most visible symptoms of complex systems I’d never sought to understand. Now look around. The systems we all depend on—organizational, political, economic, ecological—are...