Facilitators as Liminal Leaders, Saint Paul University, Ottawa, Canada
 

Liminal leaders guide people across thresholds — from the known into the possible — holding uncertainty as a generative space rather than a void to be filled. Facilitators of TAP climate change dialogues and back-channel Track II diplomatic negotiations embody this form of leadership. We stand in the threshold between the dead-end violence of war and ecocide and the possibility of peace and a flourishing planet waiting to be born. Our skill is to guide without
directing, to sense the moment when the collective intelligence at the table replaces individual bullying and gamesmanship. At the edge of the old world of failed diplomacy and ecocide and the new world of genuine peacemaking, the liminal facilitator is guardian of the space where transformation begins. She does not command consensus from adversarial parties. She listens for the always possible
breakthroughs in the silence between words. Uncertainty is her sacred ground — the in-between fertile moment before agreement takes shape — for it is in this moment when peace seems
distant that adversaries often turn unexpectedly from violence to blessing.