Being Liminal

About Being Liminal

Being Liminal is a podcast about the changing nature of Leadership in Business & Society today. Brian and Martin explore the mindsets and skills that are necessary to navigate a world that is undergoing increasing and ever-present flux, the limits organisations place on themselves by not acknowledging the liminality of change and the edges of todays systems where we find examples of how our futures could be - if we could just embrace liminal leadership. www.beingliminal.com (https://www.beingliminal.com?utm_medium=podcast)

Publisher

Martin Dowson & Brian Hoadley

Category

arts · business

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

4 Jun 2023

Latest episode

15 Sept 2026

Latest episodes

20 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   15 Sept 2026

   Design Economy 2026: useful, relevant, representative?

   Last week the Design Council published Design Economy 2026, the latest in over a decade of reporting on what design is worth to the UK economy. We get straight into the question that actually matters to anyone working in the industry: how useful, how relevant and how representative is it? Brian comes in hot. Martin, who has been through all 57 data tables, spends a fair amount of the conversation trying not to sound like he’s in the pocket of the Design Council. Somewhere in between is what you need to know if you’re an in-house design leader hoping to take some numbers upstairs to back up the value of design. (Short version: be careful which one you pick.) Inevitably, given the week, we end up on AI and whether we’re all doomed. We’d promised ourselves we wouldn’t get hung up on this one, but there was no avoiding it. We do leave you with a very calming suggestion for the weekend. Mentioned in the episode: * Design Economy 2026 - https://www.designcouncil.org.uk/our-work/design-economy/ * Design Business Association and the Design Effectiveness Awards * Forrester’s Total Economic Impact of IBM Design Thinking * Oli Mival’s integration of OpenAI into Picsart for natural language co-working within an Agentic workflow - https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-live-1-in-the-api/#picsart * Kevin Lee & Mauro Porcini @ Samsung - Kevin as an ex Head of Design moving into Product and Digital leadership * Audree Fletcher - https://lnkd.in/p/e6GHp9KQ Stay Connected: - Visit www.beingliminal.com (http://www.beingliminal.com) for more episodes and to learn about the podcast. - Share your feedback, suggest future guests, or pose questions for upcoming episodes by reaching out through the website. - Don’t forget to subscribe, rate, and review Being Liminal on your favourite podcast platform! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.beingliminal.com (https://www.beingliminal.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

2. 

   4 Aug 2026

   A Big Bloody Experiment:

   In this episode of Being Liminal, you’ll find Brian and Martin hitting record just as the conversation is really getting going - another no-guest, no-plan conversation that ends up diving into a single, very topical thread: organisations are reacting to AI without ever having prepared for it. It begins with design. If AI-generated work mostly looks like slop, is that a victory for human designers, or a distraction? Martin’s argument is that reacting to bad AI visuals only reclaims production-level craft - the surface layer - and that the harder, systems-level work most design teams never reached is still sitting undone. From there the conversation widens into what a shrinking design team is actually for, why “designerly” thinking is migrating into roles that aren’t called design at all, and why human-crafted things - music, pottery, a book someone actually made - may become a premium people pay for rather than something widely shared. Brian brings his perspective on the AI backlash running through publishing, where detection tools flag century-old novels as machine-written and writers are cancelled on suspicion. They work through the economics nobody priced in - the honeymoon-phase pricing that has to end, and annual budgets that can’t survive consumption-based billing. And they touch on the foundational work every organisation has avoided for thirty years: sorting out its data. Underneath all of it sits a worry about time - that leadership has stopped thinking about the future, traded big bets for endless optimisation, and is now improvising. Or, as Martin puts it, what we’re seeing is the result of reactiveness without preparedness. Mentioned in this episode: * Nick Foster - Could, Should, Might, Don’t: How We Think About the Future (book) * Edinburgh Futures Institute; Southampton University (”Future World”) * Barnes & Noble and Waterstones; Hachette (publishing and AI) * Atlassian Rovo, Microsoft Copilot, Figma Make, Claude Code (tools referenced) * Arup and BT foresight teams; Corning’s aspirational glass videos * The futures/trends work Martin did at Lloyds (with Kathryn, Nathan and Laurent) * Ryanair and Lloyds - flagged as counterpoints for a future episode Stay Connected: - Visit www.beingliminal.com (http://www.beingliminal.com) for more episodes and to learn about the podcast. - Share your feedback, suggest future guests, or pose questions for upcoming episodes by reaching out through the website. - Don’t forget to subscribe, rate, and review Being Liminal on your favourite podcast platform! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.beingliminal.com (https://www.beingliminal.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

3. 

   24 Jun 2026

   Neither and Both

   Series 3 opens with Brian and Martin doing the thing the show is named after - sitting in the uncomfortable middle of a transition rather than analysing it from a safe distance. Brian is part-way through a staged shift from full-time consultant to full-time novelist, and describes himself as "neither and both": no longer fully one thing, not yet the other. Martin is moving deeper into independent advisory work, where the job has become helping teams who have no realistic plan walk into a room with no predetermined framework and trust that the work will emerge. From there they open it out and argue that a plan should be a loosely-held theory rather than a fixed commitment, that frameworks and methods are means and not the destination, and that organisations are now in permanent flux — "instability is the stability of the moment." Listen in to find out how they end up deciding that a Farmer would make for a great guest and where the season could go (maybe?)- away from design talk, toward conversations with creatives, makers and farmers about how everyone is navigating the same flux. With a challenging reframe to close - how do we move from human-centred design to human-centred business. Mentioned in this episode: Plotters vs. pantsers Design tools applied to fiction: journey mapping, experience maps, persona building Brian's five-year plan (set out in 2022; consulting-to-writing transition) Brian's publishing build-out: five novels published, a sixth in progress, further fantasy and crime series planned, Shopify site, TikTok shop Lloyds Banking Group (where Martin and Brian previously worked together) Learnings from the Pre-Fjord era of Accenture (Martin's early career) Project-to-product operating model shift and Fractional head of product and design roles (Martin & Brian's client work)Multi-System pressures viewed through UK farming: inheritance tax changes, climate change, commodity price suppression "Human-centred business" (Martin's closing reframe of human-centred design) This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.beingliminal.com (https://www.beingliminal.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

Apple Podcasts (US)

5.0 / 5

1 ratings

Spotify

4.0 / 5

1 ratings

Podcast Authority Score: 18 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

36

Social presence

0

YouTube

0

Engagement

0

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Guest appearances

Does not typically book guests

Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.