Leading from the In-Between: Lessons from Nepantla

By M.E. Avila

Organizations are designed around boundaries. Departments have defined responsibilities, professions develop specialized expertise, funding is attached to specific outcomes, and accountability follows established structures. These boundaries are necessary. They help organizations determine who is responsible for what and create systems for measuring whether the work is being done.

Communities, however, are not nearly as orderly.

A housing problem can quickly become a health problem. Transportation affects employment, education, healthcare, food access, and the ability to reach essential services. Community violence carries consequences for families, neighborhoods, schools, healthcare systems, public safety, and local economies. During a disaster, the lines separating public health, emergency management, government, healthcare, nonprofits, housing, transportation, and human services can disappear almost overnight. What one organization identifies as a single issue may be experienced by a family as only one part of a much larger reality.

This creates a question that has become increasingly important to me throughout my work: Who is paying attention to what happens between the systems?

Nepantla is a Nahuatl term associated with being in the middle or in between. Its roots extend far beyond contemporary leadership or organizational practice, and its meaning should not be reduced to a management concept. Still, there is something valuable in considering what the middle allows us to see. When we are not standing entirely within one perspective, we may be better positioned to recognize realities that appear separate, competing, or even contradictory. That matters because two things can be true at the same time.

A program can meet its performance measures and still be difficult for people to access. Data can accurately identify a trend while missing important context about why it is happening. A policy can be necessary for accountability while creating an unintended barrier during implementation. An organization can be highly effective at fulfilling its individual mission while the larger system remains fragmented and difficult for people to navigate.

Leadership often requires resisting the urge to immediately decide which of those realities is correct. Sometimes the more useful question is what each perspective is showing us that the other cannot.

This becomes particularly important when institutional knowledge meets what is being observed on the ground. Organizations may bring data, policy, funding requirements, operational capacity, and professional expertise to a problem. Communities and frontline professionals may recognize changing conditions, historical context, behaviors, relationships, and barriers that have not yet appeared in formal reporting. One form of knowledge does not have to invalidate the other. When they are examined together, they can provide a much fuller understanding of what is actually happening.

There are real consequences when that does not occur.

Fragmentation is expensive. Organizations can invest resources in similar activities while another need remains unaddressed. Staff can spend valuable time navigating referral systems that do not connect people to meaningful assistance. Programs can struggle with participation because barriers identified during implementation were never considered during planning. People can be asked to repeat their circumstances to multiple organizations because information and processes are disconnected.

When systems do not connect themselves, the burden of making those connections often falls on the people trying to navigate them.

That is not simply a community engagement problem. It is an operational problem, a resource problem, and ultimately a leadership problem.

Addressing it requires more than bringing organizations together for meetings or establishing partnerships on paper. It means understanding what resources already exist before creating something new. It means examining data alongside what frontline professionals and communities are observing. It means identifying where referrals repeatedly break down, where responsibilities overlap, and where one organization's capacity can strengthen another's. It also means recognizing that collaboration has little value if it does not eventually change how something works.

This is where the ability to translate across systems becomes important.

The translator is not necessarily the person with the deepest expertise in every discipline. That would be unrealistic. It is the person who understands enough about different environments to recognize where information, resources, responsibility, or understanding is being lost between them. They can move between strategy and implementation, between data and experience, and between institutional priorities and community realities without assuming that one perspective must replace another.

My own work across grassroots initiatives, education, public health, workforce development, community safety, and emergency preparedness has reinforced the importance of this role. The value of moving through these spaces has not simply been accumulating experience in different fields. It has been seeing how often they intersect and recognizing how much can be missed when we look at a complex problem through only one professional lens.

A community observation can become an important data question. A public health concern can reveal an emergency preparedness vulnerability. A safety issue can have consequences for health and economic stability. An educational partnership can strengthen workforce capacity. A relationship developed during ordinary operations can become essential when a community is suddenly under stress. The connections are there whether our organizational structures recognize them or not.

Perhaps that is what makes Nepantla particularly meaningful when thinking about leadership.

The middle is not necessarily a place of indecision. It can be a place of observation. It can require us to become comfortable enough with complexity to listen to competing perspectives, understand what each contributes, and recognize what becomes possible when those perspectives are brought together.

Strong systems will always need people with deep expertise who know their lanes exceptionally well. But they also need people willing to look across those lanes and ask what is happening in the spaces between them.

Sometimes that is where the gap is.

Sometimes that is where the solution has been waiting.