Our present context places increasing burden on organisations to evolve and align. Complex supply chains, international collaborations, cross-sector partnerships, and interdisciplinary research all require people who can think and act across divides. Meanwhile, institutions face pressures they were not built to absorb: technological acceleration, ecological disruption, demographic shifts, cultural dispersion, geopolitical fragmentation, and the erosion of trust.

In such conditions, traditional forms of organisation struggle. The structures that once promised stability, with hierarchies, departments, plans, have become brittle under the weight of complexity and external turbulence. The consequence is a pressing need for evolution and adaptation, in organisations and the broader social system.

This is where shapeshifters might play a critical role. Except – our dominant models are ill-suited to them. Our ways of thinking about labour were shaped in a more stable world, whether it ever existed or not. We reward outputs over alignment, growth over clarity, direct managerial responsibilities over cross-functional coordination. As a result, those who work in-between often find themselves undervalued or misunderstood: magic pixie dream workers expected to perform miracles of alignment ‘as a factor of who they are’, without much recognition for the skills or the strain involved.

The consequences are systemic. When connective work is unseen, it is under-supported. The end result: organisations and societies are less capable of adapting.

Organisations love clarity: clear roles, clear reporting lines, clear outcomes. So do funding bodies, governments, bankers and investors, impact-minded and otherwise. Fair enough: clarity is a wonderful thing. At least, as long as it’s part of an effort to understand what is. Not so when our eagerness for clarity results in us adopting a simplistic, partial model of the world that only feels clear only because it obscures critical elements of a messy reality.

Our leading assumption is that there is no clear language or model to describe what shapeshifters do. Or if there is, it’s hidden, dispersed, and not widely adopted.

Instead of clear language, what we do have is a whole bunch of metaphors. When we speak aout them, we will say that shapeshifters do the work ‘in-between’, that they operate ‘in the gaps’ between functions, hierarchies, time horizons. They ‘translate across differences’, and ‘make connections that allow the system to evolve’. What does this mean practically? As we spoke to shapeshifters and tracked their work, informally and through conversations, we heard of them being ‘the glue’ or ‘the bridge’, serving as ‘connective tissue’ and ‘building common ground’ for ‘collective sense making’ or ‘ecosystem orchestration’. Right, what does any of this mean??

The common expression ‘what do you do’ is ambivalent. It is for the obvious reason that you might name your role, your company, the sector you work in, or any combination of those, with various level of granularity. But also, more fundamentally, because the question ‘what you do’ prompts two different types of answers.

• There is ‘the goal you pursue and the consequences of your labour’, what you aim to achieve, what the results of your actions are.
• There are also the processes you follow, the set of activities that make up your day, the skills and tools you deploy, the concrete actions you perform as you move towards a certain goal.

For professions that are well-known, well-defined and well-understood, there is a sort of short-circuit between the two. The goal is perceived as self-evident, and the activities as self-evidently supporting the goal. This is what we understand for ‘I’m a teacher, I’m a lawyer, I’m a doctor, I’m a carpenter’. We know what those people do, and why. We’ve read about it, we’ve heard about it, we’ve seen it in the movies.

In the case of shapeshifters, both lack clarity. It’s not clear what the function of a shapeshifter is within a system or an organisation, i.e. ‘what happens as a result of them doing what they do, and why is it useful’. But also, the process they follow, i.e. ‘this outcome seems great, but how would anyone even begin to make it happen?’

In short, we’re not quite sure what shapeshifters do, why it matters, whether it works, nor even what the difference is between a good or a bad shapeshifter.