Keeping the Magic In
I have been turning this over since a visit to Avebury, the great stone circle in Wiltshire, the older and larger sibling of Stonehenge. The circle sits inside an enormous earthwork, the bank and ditch that make up the henge, dug out by hand thousands of years ago. Standing there, my friend and I got talking to a man about a stretch of the bank that had been built in the traditional way, and another that had been rebuilt more recently. I asked him why they had gone to all that trouble, what they had been trying to keep out. And he said, no, that's not it. They were trying to keep the magic in.
They were trying to keep the magic in. That has stayed with me, because it is almost the opposite of how we usually imagine a boundary. We tend to picture a boundary as a defence, a wall against a threat, something that keeps the unwanted out. But that is not what a boundary is doing at its best. At its best it is holding something precious in, so that it can be worked with. A good enough boundary does not wall off experience. It gathers it. It keeps our feelings, our data, our history, everything we bring as human beings, inside a frame steady enough that we can actually use it, here and now, rather than having to defend against it.
An old idea we've stopped naming
Boundaries do not get named very often in the world of work these days. In supervision, and in organisational consultation, I notice them constantly. I hold them in mind as I work, and I find myself offering them back to teams more and more, because I have come to think of them as one of the most useful resources a team has. But the language itself has quietly fallen out of use. When we do reach for the word now, we usually mean something personal. My space, my time, my capacity to say no. That is a real and important use. But it is only one use, and by narrowing the word down to the personal we have lost something that teams and organisations badly need.
The way I think about boundaries is this. They are always negotiable, and they are permeable. At a very practical level they live in our minds until we discuss them, share them, or agree them. Until they are worked with they stay implicit, and what is a boundary for me may not be a boundary for you at all. Take something as ordinary as starting and finishing on time. In my mind that can be a way of containing a team, a way of signalling clearly when we are working and when we are not. For someone else, punctuality is purely a matter of respect. For a third person it carries no weight at all. And I have lived and worked in cultures where a time boundary of that kind is more or less unheard of. So even the simplest example turns out to be deeply contextual. The point is not that one view is right. The point is that if we are working together, surfacing what our various boundaries actually are, what each of us is holding silently in mind, can be enormously useful. Most of the time we never do. We just collide with each other's, and take the collision personally.
Two senses of one word
I should say plainly that I am using the word boundary in two senses in this piece, because they are not quite the same thing and I do not want to blur them. One is the holding frame, the container, the circle drawn around the work. The other is the scope of our authority, what any of us may do or agree on behalf of the whole. A holding frame and a remit are different creatures. But they share the thing that matters most to me here. A boundary, in either sense, is not a wall. It is a place to reason and hold from, together.
Containment, and the circle
Let me stay with the holding frame first, because it is the one we have most forgotten. Containment is one of the ideas I lean on here, and I should say I work integratively, from several traditions rather than one. But it is a place where I find Bion (1962) especially useful. He described a relationship in which one party can hold and make sense of difficult experience on behalf of another, so that what was overwhelming becomes something that can be thought about rather than simply discharged. Carried into groups and organisations, a container is what a clear task, a defined role, an agreed time, and a shared way of working provide. Not a cage. A holding frame sturdy enough to let anxious, uncertain work be done without flooding.
Jung reached for a similar image, and it maps almost uncannily onto Avebury. He used the Greek word temenos (Jung, 1968), the sacred precinct marked off around a temple, the protected enclosure, the magic circle, to describe the kind of bounded space in which real inner work can safely happen. The boundary is what makes the space sacred, which is to say, what makes it usable. Draw the circle, and something can happen inside it that could not happen out in the open.
And I want to be precise about how the two fit together, because I do not think a boundary simply helps containment along. It is closer than that. The boundary is what makes containment possible in the first place. There is no inside to hold anything until you have drawn the edge. But a boundary on its own is not enough. A boundary can just as easily make a wall as a container, and a wall contains nothing, it only keeps things out. What turns the one into the other is permeability. A container has to be firm enough to hold and open enough to let experience in and be worked with. So containment is not something separate that sits beside a boundary. It is what a good boundary is already doing.
Reading boundaries from behaviour
And if a boundary can do that, if it can keep the magic in, then it is worth being able to see them in the first place. When we watch people working, and attend to what is actually happening rather than what we assume, we can often sense what someone's boundaries are, whether they name them or not. If a person is late all the time and entirely comfortable with it, you are seeing what they hold in mind. You may be seeing that they have a boundary only for themselves, one that does not extend to the team. Or that they have no boundary there at all.
And it is not only individuals you can read this way. A team shows you its boundaries in how it works together, whether it has ever put words to them or not. Watch where it starts and stops. Watch what it treats as not up for discussion, and what it quietly lets slide. Watch how it behaves when a decision drifts past what the team is really authorised to take, whether someone names it, or whether the room simply moves on. The boundaries are there in the behaviour, in the pauses, in what gets raised and what gets carefully left alone. No one has usually named them. But they are being enacted all the same. And if we attend to the working itself, rather than to what people say about the working, we can begin to see them. That seeing matters, because a boundary no one can see is a boundary no one can use. Once a team can see its own edges, it can begin to treat them as something shared, rather than something each person keeps colliding with in private.
And this is the question I keep returning to. Whether boundaries are a resource we can use for the whole. Because I think they are. A shared view of where our edges lie is a genuinely terrific resource, and in our current, heightened individualism we have largely lost sight of it. We have become anxious that naming boundaries will make people feel scrutinised, or given a hard time. So we leave them unspoken. And then we are surprised when the team cannot hold together under pressure.
Two levels of boundary work
There are two levels of boundary work I find useful with teams. The first is our ways of working. When do we meet, and how? How do we handle actions and decisions? How do we hold each person, and the whole, to account? What are the team's accountabilities, as distinct from any one person's? These are usually straightforward to agree, and agreeing them is ongoing work, revisited whenever new members arrive or circumstances change. This is the housekeeping of a functioning team, and most teams can do it once they decide to.
The second level is the one I have become more concerned about. It is what I would call functional, or organisational, authority. These are questions about the scope of a role or a body's authority. What is any of us permitted to agree or do on behalf of the whole? Are there guidelines around the extent of that authority, and, just as importantly, does anyone remember that there are? An organisation transfers funding to another under a memorandum of understanding, and then the work does not unfold as agreed, but the money has already moved. Two organisations merge, and in settling the larger deal they change the terms of employment for the people of just one of them, a piece that was never really part of the negotiation between the boards, that was assumed, or passed over, and so it lands hardest exactly where it was least considered. In almost every case a functional authority boundary exists and could be named, looked at, raised. The trouble is not usually that the boundaries are absent. The trouble is that people have lost the habit, or never had the experience, of working from them.
The polarity I keep meeting
And when that habit is lost, here is what I keep meeting. A painful polarity. At one pole, no shared boundaries at all. At the other, boundaries that technically exist but are never used as a resource. Neither pole helps the people who are trying to act on behalf of the whole.
And we are living through a moment that makes this harder. Accountability structures are weakening. Against that backdrop I keep seeing capable people quietly collapse, not into rebellion, but into self-doubt. When a decision is taken that runs counter to what was agreed, they do not reach for the boundary. They reach for a story about themselves. Maybe I have a different moral code. Maybe I am overthinking it. Maybe they know something I do not. Maybe I am just not as competent as they are. Any one of those might be worth considering. But taken together they amount to a continuous undermining of a person's own authority and role. The person becomes so busy asking whether they are good enough that they can no longer see the boundary sitting right in front of them. And note, I am not talking about whistleblowing here. I am talking about something far more ordinary, a shared understanding of the scope of our authority. So many of us hand disproportionate power to people in positions of authority, and in doing so we decline to take up our own. The boundary is precisely the thing that could give us somewhere to stand.
The boundaries I have crossed
I have just described capable people collapsing into a story about themselves when a boundary is crossed. I want to be clear that I have been on the other side of that, too. I have crossed boundaries I knew perfectly well were there.
Years ago I was on staff at a group relations conference, an associate director at the time. The lift to the main plenary broke down, and two participants who used wheelchairs could not get into the room. Other participants began lifting the chairs in by hand, certain they were helping, and I threw myself in with them, busy, useful, solving the problem right in front of me. But it was not really helping. The two people being lifted felt exposed by all the attention, and unsafe in the handling of it, and were left trying to be gracious about a situation they had never asked for. The people doing the lifting were anxious and strained. What looked like kindness was doing a quiet harm. It was only later, in the directorate meeting, when a colleague challenged my thinking, that I saw what I had actually done. I had been managing the individuals, and I had taken my eye off the whole. The boundary that mattered was not the one around those two people. It was the organisational one. The conference centre had failed in its obligation to provide proper access, and that was the boundary that needed naming and holding on behalf of everyone. Because I was so busy helping, I could not see it, and the helping itself was making things worse. It remains one of the most useful pieces of learning I have had.
And more broadly, this is the pattern I know from the inside. Whenever I have gone beyond what I knew to be the boundary of my role, overhelped, overstepped, done work that was not mine to do, it has been a problem. And it fails in a particular way, one worth naming precisely. When I overstep, the people I am working with do not take up their own power and authority. They become indebted to me, or they hand me a role I should not hold, instead of my being able to stay in my own role and be genuinely useful to them, to their thinking and their projections and their work. The boundary of my own role, held, is what lets them take up theirs. Crossed, however kindly, it quietly takes something from them. So a boundary is not only a resource for the whole. It is also the thing that keeps me useful.
When the boundary is ethical
I was reminded of all this working with a global team recently. They were strong on the technical dimensions of boundaries. What the contract said, what had been agreed about timelines, who was responsible for what. Where they felt genuinely challenged was the human dimension, the human-rights questions the work raised, and how they might hold a collective position on those as an organisation. What struck me was the distinction they were drawing, almost without naming it, between technical boundaries and ethical ones. And I want to be precise here, because it matters. These were ethical questions, not moral ones. A moral position tends to be personal. My own sense of right and wrong, held privately and often defended alone. An ethical position is collective. It is a stance an organisation works out and holds together, on behalf of the whole and often on behalf of the people its work affects. The team's difficulty was not that they lacked personal convictions. It was that they had no agreed collective boundary to reason from when the human-rights dimension came into view.
This is why the ethical register is so often the hardest. The technical boundaries are usually written down somewhere. The ethical ones frequently are not. They have to be surfaced, deliberated, and agreed, which is slow and uncomfortable work, and easy to avoid when there is a deadline. But without them, people are left doing privately and morally what the organisation has never done collectively and ethically. And that is exactly the moment I described before, where a person collapses into maybe it is just me, maybe I have a different moral code, instead of being able to point to a shared ethical boundary the organisation holds.
When boundaries are challenged
It is worth looking at what it costs when boundaries are ignored, tested, or reached across, whether for personal gain, factional interest, or simply because circumstances have changed. Take something close to home first. Most boards operate within a defined remit. There is usually a limit on the size of investment or borrowing they can commit to on their own authority, above which the decision belongs somewhere else, to the members, the trustees, a parent body. That threshold is a boundary. It exists precisely so that a small group cannot commit the whole to a risk the whole never agreed to carry. But under pressure, when an opportunity looks urgent, or the numbers are complicated enough that nobody quite wants to ask, that boundary is exactly the one that gets quietly stepped over. A board approves a level of borrowing beyond its remit, and often no one in the room names it, because to name it would feel like distrust, or like slowing things down. Yet the remit is not an obstacle. It is the organisation's own considered statement about the scope of that board's authority. The useful question, when the figure creeps past the threshold, is not who is being difficult. It is which boundary now governs this decision, and whose it is to take.
I have sat with someone who had many sleepless nights over exactly this. What changed was not new information. It was remembering, together, that the terms of reference already existed, and that he could return to them. The boundary had been there the whole time. What he had lost, and then found again, was the permission to reach for it. That was the turning point.
I do not want to dwell only in the register of usefulness, because it would be dishonest to speak of boundaries only that way. Sometimes a boundary is clearly in place, agreed, written into rules and checks, and it is quietly overridden. And when that happens, the impact on people can be extraordinary. I think of the Boeing 737 MAX. In 2018 and 2019 two of these aircraft crashed, a Lion Air flight and an Ethiopian Airlines flight, and 346 people died. At the centre of it was a piece of flight-control software that could push the nose of the plane down, added so the new aircraft would handle like the old one and spare the cost of retraining pilots and recertifying the design. The safety certification, the independent check that is meant to sit as a boundary between a manufacturer and the flying public, had in large part been delegated back to the company itself. The congressional inquiry afterwards found flawed engineering assumptions, a lack of transparency, and grossly insufficient oversight from the regulator (US House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, 2020). Commercial pressure had been allowed to lean on the very boundary whose whole purpose was to be immovable. So that is the other reason we need them. Not only because, worked with well, they are something we can reason from, but because some boundaries are the very thing standing between people and harm.
Negotiating across boundaries
This is really the heart of it. A boundary is not a wall, and it is not a rule to be enforced without thought. It is a place to take decisions from, a vantage point to work from when there is a challenge. If two of us are in disagreement, the useful question is, what is the next boundary? We might have a team boundary, an organisational boundary, or a contracted boundary held on behalf of the organisation, that we can review and reason from together. The disagreement does not have to be settled by force of personality, or by whoever is more senior, or by one person privately deciding they must be the incompetent one. It can be referred outward and upward to the relevant boundary, made explicit, and negotiated.
That is what I mean by boundaries as a resource rather than a risk. Because they are permeable and negotiable, they can be worked with. Surfaced, tested, agreed, revised. Their permeability is not a weakness to defend against. It is what makes negotiation possible in the first place. A team that can name its boundaries and reason from them has somewhere to stand together. A team that cannot is left with individuals each privately wondering whether they are the problem. And there is a loop worth naming. The experience of being held, of actually having somewhere to stand together, is often what gives a team the trust to keep its edges in the first place. So it runs both ways. The boundary makes the holding possible, and the holding, once it is felt, is what makes the boundary something people are willing to keep.
For leaders and practitioners
If any of this resonates, here are the questions I have found worth sitting with, for your own systems as much as anyone else's.
What boundaries am I holding silently in mind that I have never actually surfaced with my team?
Where might my colleagues be holding a boundary quite different from mine on the same issue, and have we ever compared them?
When I watch my team at work, what boundaries can I see it enacting that no one has ever named aloud?
When a decision is taken that runs counter to what we agreed, do I reach for the relevant boundary, or do I reach for a story about my own competence, morality, or worth?
What is the actual scope of authority here, mine, my board's, this role's? Is it written down anywhere? When did we last look?
When two positions conflict, what is the next boundary we could reason from together?
Where have I handed my own authority to someone in a position of power, and declined to take up my own?
Boundaries need to be good for everybody. Used well, they are not a way of policing people or catching them out. They are a shared, collective resource that lets a group act on behalf of the whole, especially under pressure. And because a team's boundaries live in how it actually behaves, and not only in what it declares, they can be seen, and what a team can see together it can begin to work with together. We are in a moment when that capacity is being eclipsed. People are struggling to work with boundaries under pressure, let alone to name the impact of decisions taken in defiance of them. But an eclipse is only a temporary obscuring. The boundary that has disappeared from view has not disappeared. It is still there, to be worked from, as a resource, and one that could benefit all of us.
A note on confidentiality: where this piece draws on client and supervisory work, identifying details have been changed to protect the confidentiality of those involved.
References
Bion, W.R. (1962) Learning from Experience. London: Heinemann.
Jung, C.G. (1968) Psychology and Alchemy. 2nd edn. Collected Works, vol. 12. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
US House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure (2020) Final Committee Report: The Design, Development and Certification of the Boeing 737 MAX. Washington, DC: US House of Representatives, September.