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The Wicked Opportunities Podcast
The world is filled with Wicked Problems - incredibly complicated predicaments that don’t have simple solutions. However, the real problem isn’t our complex world, but rather our outdated mindsets. The way that we see the future directly impacts the actions that we take today, so a better world requires better visions. Join futurists Yvette Montero Salvatico and Frank Spencer each week as they use the Natural Foresight® Framework to reframe our Wicked Problems into the transformational ideas that they call Wicked Opportunities.
The Wicked Opportunities Podcast
Long Live the Liminal
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Let’s talk about menopause.
Not because this is a medical podcast, but because menopause is one of the most powerful, under-examined, and culturally misunderstood transitions we have. And it perfectly captures what this episode is really about: liminality, the space where you are no longer what you were, but not yet what you’re becoming... and where magical possibilities abound!
In this Spill, Yvette and Frank step into the “L” of ALIVE and make a bold claim: our society isn’t afraid of change; it’s afraid of the in-between.
We live in achievement mode. We reward certainty. We rehearse VUCA as if volatility and uncertainty are design flaws instead of natural conditions of growth . But nature tells a different story. In ecological systems, the richest biodiversity doesn’t exist in the stable prairie or the established forest. Instead life thrives in the ecotone, the transitional space where two environments meet and something entirely new can emerge.
Organizations love to talk about transformation, but what they often want is a clean leap from A to B, with as little ambiguity or disruption as possible. The problem is that the so-called “bad lands” in between is precisely where development happens. It’s where identities loosen, power structures wobble, where relationships birth untamed promiscuity, and imagination stretches beyond inherited narratives. It’s where complexity matures and new potential states begin to take form.
Liminality isn’t dysfunction. It isn’t weakness. And it isn’t something to medicate, optimize, or fast-forward through. It is the generative tension of becoming, the fertile instability that allows new ideas, new relationships, and new futures to take root.
Intentional evolution requires a different relationship with change. Not change management as a technique, but a deeper intimacy with transition itself. The willingness to remain present when the old story has dissolved and the new one hasn’t yet stabilized.
Less fear of the fog.
More faith in the meadow.
Long live the liminal.