The Organization as a Liminal Space

If I can bring an oceanic analogy into the conversation, I think we all can agree that companies rarely bring in new people when the workplace is a boat passing through calm waters. As an IT analyst, my last few placements were when the boat was on fire in a hurricane. With the speed within many corporate environments quickly ramping up to be more connected, more communicative, and smarter in their decisions within the industry, the organization must think of itself as a liminal space.

Think of liminal space as a portal between one state of being to another. If you were on a road trip, it’s the point where you are in the car, jamming out to a mix-tape, navigating the backroads of possible uncertainty and adventure. Some people rather think about the destination, but what if there was no finite endpoint? With many businesses, the perfect environment that is 100% efficient and running smoothly is unattainable, a moving target as the world is in constant flux. Does that mean we stop the car and turn off John Denver’s Country Roads? Not at all! It becomes a change of perception that gets rid of change as a teleporter from Star Trek but as a livable spaceship traversing the galaxies.

When I entered the agriculture realm, I was daunted to see that the company I was working for, one of the largest producers of agrochemicals in the world, was on the cusp of entering into the digital agriculture space with our farmers and ag-retailers in tow. What we saw was a monolith of inefficiency and disorganization. Many of our internal stakeholders and external trading partners knew what they wanted but were unsure how exactly to achieve it. We took it in small steps: we developed a strategy for the next 5 years of deployment or migration of eConnectivity messaging, understood what we could migrate and what needed to temporarily be left behind, and highlighted the most appropriate stakeholders to bring aboard to pilot. In our case, there were 3 key areas to move into a hub model: AR/AP invoicing, logistics, and end-user reporting.  In connection with a 3rd party provider, we moved all our largest retailers, over a million dollars of our retail business, into a hub model. We knew that this wasn’t an end-all solution: there were going to be obstacles fitting every current trading partner’s communication plan into our hub, we would need to upgrade and refine our mapping and messages as needed, and that we were going to be adding more trading partners as our business grew. The transition was far from perfect, but we were able to make serious strides that had our retail partners and even the growers themselves thinking of the transactional and reporting of our products as a part of a bigger digital eCommerce picture. In the end, the last months of my time were not in a static position but set the table for our eConnectivity space to take the next leap into electronic orders and bookings.

Agriculture was not the only space where I would assist with an organization’s take on transitional change. From late 2020 to 2021 I was part of a full-scale migration from a legacy ERP system to a Microsoft Dynamics 365 ERP (Business Central) and a fully connected eCommerce platform (Sana). As with my previous projects, we took a road of looking at the business as one that will be continuously changing and growing, needing scale and forward-thinking solutions from the very start. That is a big part of my contributions as an analyst in these types of projects, not just scooping up the requirements and needs from the business and translating them into the architecture of a new system, but also looking at them through a lens of how might the workplace, its products, and it people may change over time.

There is, in my opinion, a certain amount of strength with a corporate brand that is rock-steady and unfaltering its goal. But I believe we have to be honest. There are going to be variables of change and opportunities for the future that will need room in the overall vision to handle fluctuations and growth. It might be time to stop thinking of the business community that we choose to dwell in as just a brick-and-mortar building, but perhaps one that has wheels, tracks, or maybe even skis if we are traversing continuous improvement as a unified team. If I can return to the boat thing from the start of this post, Minnesotans have within our history an early example of movable commerce: the voyageur canoe. It’s might not seem as impressive as the mighty frigates of the ocean but they were versatile, able to navigate both shallow and deep water, withstand winter and summer temperatures, and carry cargo throughout North America. As voyageurs, the canoe becomes both the transport and home, connecting communities and cultures. I think we could use more of that voyageur mindset today.

-AJ