The Future Looks Bright: Toward a Dialectical Understanding of the Future in the Strategy-Making Process

Abstract

While the future is unknowable, this intriguing temporal category has become a predominant issue in modern discourse. However, less is known about how actors navigate tensions and contradictions that arise when engaging with the future in strategy-making. This gap is problematic, as unresolved tensions may limit social actors’ ability to generate novel insights and fully embrace the future’s uncertainty. This paper presents a dialectical framework that explains inherent future-related tensions and contradictions in the strategy-making process, showcases four perspectives of the future—incremental, expanding, punctuated, and speculative—and explores how social actors synthesize these tensions through the practice of imagining. In doing so, this paper contributes to scholarship on future-making and strategy-making, highlighting theoretical implications and outlining promising avenues for future research.

Keywords

dialectical perspective future-making practices futures imagining strategy-as-practice strategy-making

Introduction

We are in the midst of a very urgent, real, global and deadly crisis. But as that crisis hopefully comes slowly under control, some at least will need to attend to a very different kind of crisis, and one which is scarcely visible. This “imaginary crisis” is the result of a deficit of social imagination. Many people find it hard to picture a plausible and desirable society a generation or two in the future . . .

This lack of desirable but plausible futures may be contributing to the malaise that can be found across much of the world. It’s certainly linked to a sense of lost agency and a deepening fear of the future.

(Mulgan, 2020, p. 4, emphasis added)

In recent years, a series of global disruptions—from pandemics to geopolitical conflict and accelerating climate change—have underscored the deep uncertainty surrounding the future (Phan & Wood, 2020). At the same time, the elusive nature of solutions to grand challenges such as technological disruption, poverty, and systemic racism (Eisenhardt et al., 2016) is emblematic of how tensions and contradictions associated with an uncertain future complicate strategy-making. The future consists of “alternative states and possible outcomes that could occur but have not yet occurred” (Lord et al., 2015, p. 264). As the quote above highlights, not only may uncertainty present a problem, but our imagination of the future may also be very precarious. In response, some scholars have called for political and societal agendas that imagine glorious utopias and thus embrace this uncertainty, because “if we don’t imagine the future we want, we’re never going to get there” (Zietsma, 2020). Mulgan (2020, p. 4) called this situation the “imaginary crisis.”

Calls to embrace this uncertainty have also been addressed by strategy scholars like Burgelman (2002) to understand “how strategy-making shapes a company’s future.” Strategy scholars have proposed tools to facilitate classical strategic planning (Boulton et al., 1982; Mason, 1969; Miller & Cardinal, 1994), forecasting (Dane & George, 2014; Fergnani, 2022), and scenario planning (Hodgkinson & Healey, 2008) to mitigate the uncertainty of the future in the strategy-making process and render it more predictable. Indeed, many strategy scholars have attempted to use a “model-based assessment of the likelihoods of different possible future outcomes” to rationalize the future (March, 2006, p. 203). However, more recently, the discourse on embracing uncertainty has gained traction in both popular (King & Kay, 2020; Rovelli, 2019; Taleb, 2016) and academic literature. Increasingly, scholars are recognizing that “it is time for uncertainty to retake its place as a central concept” (Alvarez et al., 2018, p. 169). In this burgeoning line of inquiry, researchers have begun to question the solely rational approach to the future in strategy-making.

Recent studies have emphasized that the future is “unknowable” (Wenzel, Krämer, et al., 2020). Similarly, Tsoukas and Shepherd (2004, p. 2) argued that “we must accept that the future is inherently open-ended.” However, when engaging with this unknowable future, actors face inherent tensions and contradictions that challenge traditional strategy-making approaches (Seidl & Werle, 2011). These tensions often stem from competing demands: the need for long-term stability versus the need for flexibility (Raisch et al., 2009); the desire for control over strategic outcomes versus the acceptance of uncertainty (Goold & Quinn, 1990; Schreyögg & Steinmann, 1987); and the pursuit of innovation within the constraints of existing resources and structures, which can lead to cognitive (Santos et al., 2016) and organizational conflicts (Farjoun & Fiss, 2022). Furthermore, strategic efforts to anticipate the future may inadvertently impose limitations, reinforcing certain solutions while closing off alternative pathways. These tensions can stifle actors’ imaginations, thereby limiting their capacity to generate novel insights that would enable them to respond dynamically to emerging futures. While some may perceive the future as a continuation of the past, others may perceive it as discontinuous and believe that it is nearly impossible to predict what will happen. Yet, how social actors engage with different, sometimes even contradicting, perceptions of the future remains poorly understood.

This lack of understanding is particularly concerning for strategists, because strategy-making deals fundamentally with future actions in an increasingly complex world (Rosa, 2013). If the future is viewed not as a static state that simply follows the present, but as an unactualized state that actors must actively enact (Lord et al., 2015), strategists must cultivate a shared understanding of potential futures. Failing to address these tensions can lead to significant short-termism, where organizations prioritize immediate gains at the expense of long-term viability (Slawinski & Bansal, 2015). Urgency to act may push strategists into panic mode, such that their actions are driven by crises rather than informed foresight (Skade et al., 2025), or their biases toward available facts unduly influence strategic choices (Barnes, 1984). As a result, these ambiguities could result in a retreat to outdated rationalist strategic planning modes that prioritize certainty over potential new insights. Fostering a nuanced understanding of these tensions equips strategists to generate novel strategic insights to position their organizations to thrive in a complex environment.

In this paper, I theorize how social actors address inherent tensions and contradictions associated with different perspectives of the future through the future-making practice of imagining. By mobilizing a dialectical approach, similar to other investigations in the strategy-related literature (Bourgeois, 1984; Chanin & Shapiro, 1985; Cosier, 1981; Farjoun & Fiss, 2022), I propose a framework that considers the tensions and contradictions that actors experience, identifies how different perspectives of the future affect strategy-making, and shows how imagining enables actors to synthesize these different perspectives. Such a dialectic approach to dealing with uncertainty enables actors to recognize and leverage their agency to create the future.

Theoretical Background

How uncertainty affects strategy-making

Dealing with uncertainty is inherent to the strategy-making process. Importantly, uncertainty is not the same as risk (Knight, 1921), which occurs “when decision makers [do] not know, with certainty, what a decision outcome would be but [do] know the possible outcomes associated with a decision” (Alvarez et al., 2018, p. 169). In contrast, uncertainty exists “when decision makers know neither the possible outcomes nor their probability of occurring when a decision [is] made” (p. 169). Hardy and Maguire (2016, p. 95) advanced a prospective organizing mode of risk that includes the practice of “problematizing existing expert risk knowledge and the ability of the past to predict the future”. While risk is a central topic in the strategic decision-making literature, scholars have recently called for a renewed focus on uncertainty due to its importance for strategy-making (Rindova & Courtney, 2020).

While some scholars have been interested in the overall perception of organizational uncertainty (Downey & Slocum, 1975), others have begun to investigate its implications for strategic planning (Boulton et al., 1982) or the strategic management of environmental uncertainties (Jauch & Kraft, 1986). While these insightful studies have advanced our understanding of the associated implications of uncertainty in strategy-making, prior research has primarily argued that strategy-making is about converting uncertainty into manageable predictability (Wenzel, 2022). Extending these insights, Packard and Clark (2020, p. 767) discussed choices between the logics of predictive and nonpredictive strategy: “the strategist must . . . understand which uncertainties require which logics and when a shift in logics is in order.” Given the subjective nature of strategy-making and potential benefits of embracing uncertainty, investigating how strategists deal with an uncertain future could yield insights with important implications for theory and practice.

An increased focus on temporality in the strategy-making literature

The future can be defined as “alternative states and possible outcomes that could occur but have not yet occurred because, to be actualized, they require the enactment of individual, social, and environmental events that are often serendipitous” (Lord et al., 2015, p. 264). This definition highlights the merits of such an approach in contrast to earlier studies that have mostly conceptualized time as a linear flow of past–present–future. From this perspective, one could conclude that the future comes into being when actors collectively enact it (Oomen et al., 2022; Wenzel et al., 2025).

Some scholars have noted that the emerging appreciation of the future is rooted in modern times. For example, Wenzel, Krämer, et al. (2020, p. 1441) argued that interest in the future is grounded in a post-modern shift in which “actors have begun to experience the future as [a] problematic, open-ended temporal category that they could not fully master through planning practices alone.” This is an important argument, as it reflects calls to take uncertainty seriously by reintroducing it into strategic management (Boulton et al., 1982; Jauch & Kraft, 1986; Kaplan, 2008; Packard & Clark, 2020). Taken together, this line of inquiry suggests that the future should be studied as an inherent concept of strategy-making, which indeed “is oriented toward the unfolding future” (Maclean et al., 2016, p. 623).

However, perhaps surprisingly, the majority of strategy-making research has neglected the future despite growing interest in time and temporality (Burgelman et al., 2018; Skade et al., in press). As a result, the literature on temporal work (Granqvist & Gustafsson, 2016; Kaplan & Orlikowski, 2013) has begun to address this deficit by emphasizing the need to theorize the future. For example, Kaplan and Orlikowski (2013, p. 965) argued that “projections of the future are always entangled with views of the past and present, and temporal work is the means by which actors construct and reconstruct the connections among them.” In a pivotal study, they found that temporal work is at the heart of the strategy-making process, conceptualized as “ongoing interpretations and interactions of multiple organizational participants in practice and over time” (p. 990). By paying attention to the unfolding of time, they highlighted its processual nature, with multiple futures being available and enacted in the present. Similarly, Rindova and Martins (2022) insightfully showed how “futurescapes,” i.e., organizations’ preferred futures, help social actors create narratives that shape future strategy. To reconcile the tensions between plausibility and desirability, they suggested that actors engage in “temporal reorganization” by reconfiguring existing relationships between past, present, and future. Similarly, Alimadadi et al. (2022) demonstrated how social actors can build on desirable and undesirable futures in uncertain contexts to successfully engage in strategy-making. In sum, the literature on temporal work has conceptualized strategy as a temporal construct.

Although these insights have significantly advanced our understanding of strategy-making as a temporal phenomenon, scholars have not focused on particular aspects of the future. As a result, there is a theoretical lacuna regarding how salient tensions and contradictions associated with the future affect strategy-making. This gap is problematic, as a shared understanding of how the future unfolds is necessary as actors collaboratively develop, renegotiate, and implement strategies.

How actors address future-related tensions and contradictions in the strategy-making process

In engaging with an unknowable future, actors involved in strategic decision-making encounter inherent tensions and contradictions that challenge traditional strategic planning (Seidl & Werle, 2011). However, tensions that emerge from competing demands, including the necessity for long-term stability instead of flexibility, the aspiration for control versus the acceptance of uncertainty, and the pursuit of innovation within the constraints of available resources, can, in turn, evoke organizational conflicts (Farjoun & Fiss, 2022). Addressing these tensions is, therefore, critical for strategists, as they significantly influence the efficacy of strategic initiatives in an increasingly complex environment. Cultivating a nuanced understanding of these tensions enables strategists to convert contradictions into novel strategic insights.

A larger body of research has begun to highlight how social actors address existing tensions and contradictions in relation to time and temporality. For example, Reinecke and Ansari (2015, p. 618) showed how conflicting temporal structures become entrained through ambitemporality, which occurs when “organizations accommodate seemingly contradictory temporal orientations.” The authors outlined how temporal reflexivity and appreciation of interdependencies help actors overcome these temporal conflicts. Adopting a dialectical view, Cuganesan (2022) studied dynamics of organizational conflict and found that the interplay of clock and event time could enable ambitemporality despite a dominant focus on clock time. These findings shed light on how and why organizational time regimes are infused with political struggles and highlight the importance of remaining attentive to different temporal structuring in organizations and related power asymmetries.

Another important concept associated with bridging different temporalities is temporal translation, i.e., addressing distant events in the past and future through situated activities in the present. Hernes and Schultz (2020) argued that temporal translation enables actors “to reflect on and potentially transform the temporal structures framing those activities” (p. 14); thus, distant futures and the present are “not only intertwined, but the distant may also be seen as flowing from the present” (p. 5). By engaging in temporal translation, actors may be able to “overcome the duality between present and past or future that tends to be assumed” (p. 17).

Similarly, Patriotta and Gruber (2015) suggested that “expectancy frameworks” are continuously updated through sensemaking of a near and disruptive future, thereby helping actors make temporal transitions between following a planned script and responding to unexpected events. Likewise, Rindova and Martins (2022, p. 214) discussed how temporal reorganization, “a mechanism for shifting beliefs about the feasibility and value of future actions,” helps strategists reconcile the tensions between the plausibility and the desirability of future worlds and overcome differences between the near and distant.

Finally, within the broader stream of ambidexterity research (Raisch et al., 2009), scholars have begun to theorize the process of temporal ambidexterity as “an organizational capability to demonstrate simultaneous and strong commitments to actions with short-term and long-term organizational implications” (Wang et al., 2019, p. 790). For example, Holotiuk et al. (2024) showed that temporal ambidexterity reconciles the trade-off between exploration and exploitation when actors rotate between R&D and other departments to facilitate digital innovation. Similarly, Wang et al. (2019) showed that organizations address intertemporal tensions in the context of new ventures. To resolve these tensions, they emphasize the managerial capabilities of founder-CEOs as key actors in managing such ventures. However, Farjoun and Fiss (2022, p. 359) argued that while temporal ambidexterity builds on existing tensions and conflicts, a dialectical perspective differs in that it entails an ontology of organizational activities that is “continually destabilized, and energized, by . . . contradictions and disequilibria” rather than striving for stability.

In sum, researchers have already identified how actors engage with tensions and contradictions of the future. They have drawn extensively on the concept of tensions to showcase that actors must navigate complex realities and their inherent temporal contradictions.

Taken together, many future-related tensions in the literature revolve around proximity (near versus distant) and flow (continuously unfolding versus disrupting the flow of time). Engaging with this body of literature, a dialectical perspective is already emerging, albeit implicitly, as it builds on existing insights beyond a straightforward both-and approach. While the literature demonstrates how actors navigate future-related tensions of proximity and flow, it does not fully describe the synthesis (i.e., a more-than approach) that a dialectical view would offer by generating new insights into strategy-making. This aligns with Farjoun and Fiss’s (2022, p. 343) argument that a dialectal perspective sees “contradiction as an engine for renewal and transformation.” These contradictions are not just obstacles, but act as generative forces that drive innovation and produce novelty (Benson, 1977). Recognizing these implicit dialectical assumptions, I briefly introduce the theoretical underpinnings of dialectics to clarify these latent insights within the literature.

Theoretical underpinnings of dialectics

The theory of dialectics has a long history (Hegel, 1900). Accordingly, the term is often associated with Hegel’s (1900) notions of thesis, antithesis, and the resulting creative synthesis as a new element leading to “change and development as a continuous pattern of affirmation, negation, and counter-negation” (Farjoun & Fiss, 2022, p. 347). Another prominent stream of research, based on Marx (1906) and in keeping with a critical assessment of political economy, has referred to struggles in “capitalism’s material contradictions that shaped modes of production, domination, and instrumental rationality” (Putnam et al., 2016, p. 110). Both approaches have a common aim to overcome dualisms through ongoing processes of contradicting, challenging, and synthesizing (Hook, 1994). In doing so, influential earlier work has provided a dialectical perspective on organizing (Benson, 1977, 1983), among others, and thus has contributed to an understanding of dialectical theorizing as “a general view of social life that is abstracted from the Marxist analysis of social structure and its ramifications” (Seo & Creed, 2002, p. 224). The lens of dialectics in organization theory has been greatly influenced by scholars such as Giddens and Foucault (Collinson, 2020). Extending these insights, recent organizational research has begun to showcase the theoretical strengths of a dialectical approach in addressing strategy-making (Farjoun, 2019), strategic planning (Chanin & Shapiro, 1985; Cosier, 1981), or strategic fit (Farjoun & Fiss, 2022).

Putnam et al. (2016, p. 71) defined dialectics as “independent opposites aligned with forces that push–pull on each other like a rubber band and exist in an ongoing dynamic interplay as the poles implicate each other.” This definition distinguishes dialectics from other tensions, such as paradoxes (see, e.g., Hargrave & Van De Ven, 2017), by highlighting how seemingly opposite poles can work together. This definition differs from Hegel’s (1900) understanding of dialectics and incorporates post-modern approaches into this perspective (Putnam et al., 2016). Such a perspective is especially useful for a processual understanding. As Benson (1977, p. 3) argued, a dialectical perspective is “fundamentally committed to the concept of process. The social world is in a continuous state of becoming—social arrangements which seem fixed and permanent are temporary.” Hence, this analytical tool offers a reflective lens for theorizing the underlying practices of such conflicts.

Taking dialectic relationships seriously, then, requires “focusing on the ways that organizational behavior is subject to competing efforts to shape and fix its meaning” (Mumby, 2005, p. 22). Consequently, exploring futures in strategizing from a dialectical perspective allows scholars to understand how different actors address, construct, and enact novel insights (Mumby, 2005, p. 22) through their daily practices without downplaying potential tensions and contradictions.

For example, consider an energy company with substantial historical investments in fossil fuels, now grappling with the complex and uncertain future of the energy market. By embracing the open future, the company acknowledges the need to adapt as the industry faces continuous shifts in technology, regulation, and societal expectations for sustainability. A dialectical inquiry reveals key tensions: the thesis represents the company’s longstanding reliance on fossil fuel investments, foundational to its growth and profitability. Meanwhile, the antithesis pushes for reinvesting fossil fuel revenues in renewable projects, aligning with market trends and regulatory demands.

Rather than choosing between these two perspectives, the synthesis emerges as a more-than approach that capitalizes on the strengths of each. This strategy involves leveraging revenues from fossil fuels to support renewable energy while developing capabilities for other potential energy solutions, such as hydrogen production. Here, the synthesis is not solely about investing in hydrogen, but about creating a flexible, dual strategy that allows the organization to remain open to multiple technologies and adjust as new market information emerges to capture opportunities across an evolving energy landscape.¹

Toward a Dialectical Perspective of the Future in Strategy-Making

A dialectical understanding of the future in strategy-making highlights the inherent tensions and contradictions that social actors experience. Adopting a dialectical view (Farjoun & Fiss, 2022; Langley & Sloan, 2012) offers a perspective for studying the future as a temporal category enacted through future-making practices. Indeed, a dialectical perspective conceptualizes the strategy-making process as “fluid, concatenated, creative, and never at rest” (Farjoun & Fiss, 2022, p. 343).

In Figure 1, I present a framework that captures a dialectical inquiry of the future in strategy-making as an overarching mode throughout all subsequent steps. This framework: (1) makes surfacing tensions and contradictions regarding the future visible; (2) reveals how they can be addressed through the future-making practice of imagining; and (3) synthesizes tensions by dialectical synthesis, which fosters new solutions to strategic issues.

Figure 1.

A dialectical perspective of the future in strategy-making.

Importantly, a dialectical perspective focuses on organizational praxis, highlighting the continuing struggle over the meaning of the future (see Putnam et al., 2016). However, the discussed perspectives are neither mutually exclusive nor all-encompassing for all existing tensions and contradictions. Because they have emerged as predominantly discussed dimensions in the literature,² the outlined tensions illustrate the many layers of the concept of futures. They are intended to generate insights regarding other processes and practices, such as projecting (Mische, 2009, 2014) or anticipating (Flyverbom & Garsten, 2021; Tavory & Eliasoph, 2013).

Surfacing tensions about the future

Any strategic issue may face different tensions regarding the perception of what “the” future is. In line with recent interest in how the uncertain future unfolds, I highlight two dimensions of the future—proximity and flow—that have been widely discussed in the literature, which are also relevant for strategy-making. Both dimensions relate to temporal features of the future—namely, proximity (near versus distant) and flow (continuous versus disruptive). While they are not mutually exclusive, I show that they are rarely discussed jointly. Hence, understanding how tensions about the future surface through a dialectical inquiry and how different combinations of these dimensions (near versus distant or continuous versus disruptive) enable a more nuanced understanding of how perceptions of the future affect these strategic issues.

Proximity: Near versus distant

The first tension arises between the near and distant future. The near future is proximate and directly impacted by decisions involving “uncertainty, risk of choices, and the challenge of forming expectations with partial knowledge” (Augustine et al., 2019, pp. 1933–1934). In contrast, the distant future represents “a future state of the world that is fictional in the sense that it presents a discontinuity with present reality and is not grounded in present experience” (Augustine et al., 2019, p. 1931) and affords “mental time travel” (Carton & Lucas, 2018, p. 2112).

Augustine et al. (2019, p. 1931) argued that the differences between near and distant futures relate not only to the time horizon, but also to “qualitatively different ways of representing and experiencing the future,” suggesting that distant futures reflect a higher degree of radical disruption than near futures. They showed that distant futures are necessary to allow for possible alternative outcomes, or as-if realities. In a similar vein, Carton and Lucas (2018, p. 2107) studied the idea of a “vivid vision” and mobilizing metaphors rather than “contemplat[ing] the distant future abstractly.” Likewise, Carton et al. (2014) found that leaders who can communicate a shared sense of the distant future can increase followers’ performance by distinguishing between “considering” and “seeing” the distant future.

In summary, prior studies have discussed the tensions between a near and a distant future and the possible contradictions they may evoke. By perceiving near and distant futures as somewhat incompatible concepts, this understanding renders it difficult to understand their potential relationship. Therefore, social actors’ reliance on one interpretation may conceal their connection.

Flow: Continuous vs. disruptive

The second tension arises between perspectives of the future as either continuous or disruptive. According to Beckert (2016a), a traditional approach to future-making involves seeing the future as a continuation of the present, “a circular repetition of events from the past” (p. 23). In contrast, a disruptive perspective of the future implies a modern understanding in which the future becomes “an unending disruption of the present” (p. 23) and therefore problematic (Wenzel, Krämer, et al., 2020).

This tension is omnipresent in the literature. For example, Costas and Grey (2014) studied how social actors had constructed “imaginary future selves” (p. 930) by envisioning the future to come as radically different from the present. Hence, they developed a notion of the future as a “discontinuous break with the present” (p. 909). In a similar vein, Schultz and Hernes (2013) investigated how Lego Group highlighted the ongoing influences of the past. Despite emphasizing the continuity of the future by “shed[ding] light on how connections between the past and future are highlighted, modified, suppressed, or ignored” (p. 17), their study showed how Lego’s future strategies had been significantly disrupted. Similarly, Hatch and Schultz (2017) highlighted how “historicizing” (i.e., using historical material to construct the present) helps actors to “connect their organizational past with its anticipated future,” and “keeps history alive by . . . expanding its material manifestation and meaning in the present” (p. 35).

Given these tensions associated with proximity and flow, “the dialectical vision of the future is not one of continuous, predictable development . . . rather, the future has many possibilities and the final determination depends upon human action or praxis” (Benson, 1977, p. 5). Four distinct, yet often implicit, perspectives of the future—incremental, expanding, punctuated, and speculative—relevant for strategists arise from different combinations of dimensions of proximity and flow (see Figure 2). Importantly, these perspectives depicted are not stable or fixed orientations of the social actors. Instead, they emerge through social processes in which actors interpret, negotiate, and make sense of possible futures (Rauch, 2025). In this view, these perspectives are constituted through situated meaning-making and are continuously shaped by actors’ perceptions (Beckert & Suckert, 2021), experiences (Chaudhry & Amis, 2025), and contextual temporal cues (Skade et al., 2025).

Figure 2.

Mapping different perspectives of the future across proximity and flow.

Incremental: The future as near and continuous

In fast-moving environments with manageable change, some social actors perceive the future as near and largely a continuation of the present. This perception often leads to the view that the future is mostly predetermined and difficult to fundamentally alter. Strategists may prefer this orientation because it reduces uncertainty, allows for faster decision-making, enabling quick and tangible results. To engage with such futures, strategic frameworks such as OKRs (objectives and key results; Niven & Lamorte, 2016), or Agile project management approaches such as Scrum (Mahringer & Danner-Schröder, 2025), have been developed to shape the near future through rapid strategic decisions (Eisenhardt, 1989). Because these strategic tools are highly adaptable and decidedly dynamic, they offer organizational actors ways to react to rapidly evolving environments through planning cycles as short as three to four months. However, often inherent to these methods is the assumption that the future is foreseeable. As a result, social actors often assume that if planning cycles are short enough, the strategic planning process should be able accommodate unexpected events. However, this approach can undermine an organization’s broader long-term strategy, as it focuses too narrowly on short-term strategic goals.

Expanding: The future as distant and continuous

In relatively stable environments, actors may perceive the future as only partially predetermined, hence, viewing it as distant yet unfolding in a continuous, linear way. This view undergirds a large body of research on classical approaches to strategy development in organizations (Whittington et al., 2017). Such approaches focus on gaining control over the distant future by developing long-term strategic plans (Spee & Jarzabkowski, 2011) or setting milestones (Simons, 1991) to reduce uncertainty and increase predictability. By assuming a continuous trajectory, this orientation enables organizations to sustain coordinated action over time and work steadily toward future long-term strategies (Feuls et al., 2025). Despite these benefits, classical strategic planning tools may become ineffective when organizations face unanticipated and disruptive events that deviate from a linear, continuous trajectory.

Punctuated: The future as near and disruptive

Much less research has addressed a future that is both near and disruptive, i.e., emergency situations in which the future suddenly disrupts the present, opening up uncertainty because the possible ways forward remain unknown. In such situations, strategists must adopt a punctuated perspective of the future (Roulet & Bothello, 2023). As one of a few exceptions, Stigliani and Ravasi (2012) discussed the concept of “prospective sensemaking” as particularly relevant in uncertain situations that require embracing the future. In their study, they showed that thinking in future perfect tense (Gioia et al., 2002) helps to overcome a breakdown in sensemaking. Such a situation can lead to the need for in-the-moment planning, especially during crises (Wenzel, Stanske, & Lieberman, 2020) or disasters (Jarzabkowski et al., 2022), for example. Emergency strategies are necessary when “the end is near,” and the present seems continuously unstable. Although such a perception of the future affords emergent, stressful in-the-moment planning, it may not be sustainable within an organization’s environment over the long term. This approach may hinder social actors from considering the distant future when developing strategic future plans.

Speculative: The future as distant and disruptive

Finally, strategists often see themselves confronted with futures that are both relatively distant and potentially disruptive. To engage with such uncertainty, for example, they draw on scenario-planning methods to build on worst- and best-case predictions that offer alternative versions of the future, which are then translated into strategic plans (Goodwin & Wright, 2001; Schoemaker, 1995). Like strategic foresight methods (Fergnani, 2022, p. 823), these methods do “not aim to predict the future where the organization will operate, but rather to create organizational futures through present choices matured through foresight practices.” Such foresight methods may also include scenarios of distant and highly disruptive events such as possible wars (Cumming, 2022; Rauch, 2025), pandemics (Pradies et al., 2021), or natural disasters (Jarzabkowski et al., 2022), which seem to lie in the distant future but still impact social actors’ strategy-making. While insightful, such a methodology builds on the strategic assumptions that the unknown future can be predicted, which can also be performative in the present (Garud & Gehman, 2016). While this is not a problem per se, it can result in an excessively simplified version of the future when social actors presume that they have accounted for all possibilities.

Previous research shows that actors must be open to a dialectical perspective on tensions and contradictions in strategy-making (Farjoun, 2019; Farjoun & Fiss, 2022) to fully explore novel strategies. In keeping with a dialectical perspective, this means that these four perspectives do not exist ontologically, but are the product of social construction. Next, I discuss how actors can navigate these tensions and contradictions to develop a new synthesis through future-making.

Imagining as a future-making practice

Dialectical inquiry can be enacted through future-making practices, which in turn enable social actors to synthesize existing tensions and contradictions associated with different perceptions of the future through mundane activities. Several studies have proposed the concept of “future-making practices” (Koch et al., 2016; Thompson & Byrne, 2022; Wenzel, 2022), which organizational actors can mobilize to construct and enact their future(s). A practice-based approach (Feldman & Orlikowski, 2011) focuses on the doings and sayings of individuals and on the mundane, everyday activities. These practices represent the everyday activities and “life-worlds” of social actors (Reckwitz, 2002) wherein “the future is shaped in practice—in the ‘now’—as it is interpreted and enacted” (Kaplan & Orlikowski, 2013, p. 967; see also Oomen et al., 2022). Such a practice perspective is similar to the onto-epistemological assumptions of a strategy-as-practice approach (Seidl et al., 2024), which emphasizes “the ‘what’, ‘who’ and ‘how’ of strategy practice” (Jarzabkowski et al., 2021, p. 2). Focusing on the doings of strategists seems to be particularly useful, as theoretical insights into the future-making practices of social actors under uncertainty remain scarce (Beckert, 2016b).

Imagining can be defined as an “active, generative, embodied, situated activity that is deeply intertwined with perceiving and thinking” (Elias et al., 2022, p. 3). Prior research has addressed how and why imagining the future is an important practice for strategy-making (Gibbert, 2010; Rindova & Martins, 2022; Szulanski & Amin, 2001). How social actors imagine futures is important because it plays “a key role in the coordination of organizational activities, in competitive struggles, and in the making of the future” (Beckert, 2021, p. 2, emphasis in original). Accordingly, future-making focuses on the mundane sayings and doings of social actors to study how imagining translates into concrete strategic activities.

While often understood as a cognitive activity, recent studies help to understand how imagining is also an embodied activity. To do so, strategists rely on “instruments of imagination” (Beckert, 2021), such as “strategic planning, capital budgeting, technology projections, economic forecasting, perceptual maps, and business modelling” (Thompson & Byrne, 2022, p. 249). For example, Pettit et al. (2023) show how imagining becomes a central practice in future-making during strategic change to dialectically juxtapose the “as is” with the “to be” (p. 7). They show that imagining is a practice that expands cognitive thinking and is embodied through actors’ concrete doings. Similarly, Comi and Whyte (2018) argue that imagining can be enacted through “sketches and pre-existing artefacts” (p. 1065) to generate futures. Their study of architects showcases how imagining is an embodied practice of giving form to the future by producing artifacts and materializing futures. They show how such visuals were used as imaginings to later form a “dialectical opposition of proposals and counterproposals” (p. 1069). Taken together, prior research has highlighted imagining as a central future-making practice that can be used to facilitate future-making as a process of ongoing dialectical inquiry.³

For example, Thompson (2018, p. 245) developed a process model of imagining, showcasing how actors “use imagination and creative expression to create, alter and share perceptions and images of possible futures”. In a similar vein, Komporozos-Athanasiou and Fotaki (2015, p. 321) highlighted “imaginative abilities” to “produc[e] specific images of the future in the form of future uncertainties” (p. 335). Similarly, Thompson and Byrne (2022) showed that imagined futures are often enacted through practical knowledge. Furthermore, Beckert (2021, p. 2) explained that “imaginaries of how the future will unfold” help actors “cope with turbulent environments” (p. 2); evidence that instruments of strategic planning, capital budgeting, and technology projections can become intertwined suggests that imagining is more than “a discovery of optimal paths of relating to the future” (p. 6). Rather, imagining helps actors through a process of building different imaginary “as-if” futures and acting upon them.

As a practical tool, Gioia et al. (2002, p. 622) discussed how managers make sense of the future, and change in particular, via future-perfect thinking, i.e., envisioning organizational futures as events that have already occurred. This perspective helps actors “envision a future that becomes the product of a revised past” by “imagining the future in such a way that one considers the consequences of actions in the present” (p. 630). Hence, “while imaginaries are not exclusively future-focused, they do map on to distant futures, either as an ideal or a feared state” (Augustine et al., 2019, p. 1936). In a similar vein, Gümüsay and Reinecke (2022, p. 4) proposed acts of imagination as a process of “thinking backwards from a possible future” to help investigate the future.

As a result, imagining is distinct from other future-making practices such as foreseeing, wayfinding, or projecting. While these latter practices often involve linear extrapolation from existing knowledge or trends, imagining is a generative and situated activity that unfolds through the embodied and coordinated efforts of strategists (Rindova & Martins, 2024). Similarly, Whyte et al. (2022, p. 6) argue that future-making should be understood as “a performative set of practices that bring futures into being, beyond the latent awareness suggested in the term foreseeing and the indirect action suggested in wayfinding.”

Imagining, in this sense, is not merely about envisioning outcomes, but about shaping the very field of strategic possibility. Rindova and Martins (2022) propose that imagining operates through two narrative mechanisms: creative imagination, which allows actors to envision desirable futures, and productive imagination, which enables organizations to interpret autobiographical knowledge and link it to plausible futures. These mechanisms help align diverse stakeholders, reconfigure temporal structures, and activate firm-specific agency. Accordingly, they argue that “narrative shaping provides a mechanism for changing what audiences can imagine, and might be willing to accept and support” (Rindova & Martins, 2022, p. 218) as opposed to future-making practices based on deduction from prior knowledge.

Rindova and Martins (2024) thus contend that imagining is a core capability for engaging with the future, enabling the recombination of knowledge to “generate distinctive strategies and strategic advantages” (p. 499). It is not merely a forward-looking practice (as in anticipating), but a form of “future-oriented strategizing” (p. 499). Ultimately, imagining is a socially situated practice that allows strategists to articulate and pursue a strategic purpose for their organizations (Rindova & Martins, 2023).

In summary, by studying what actors do in their daily lives, scholars develop a better understanding of how tensions in the future-making process are addressed. Similarly, Tavory and Eliasoph (2013, p. 910) extended insights into future-making by discussing how actors collectively coordinate their futures and create possible futures. Thus, strategists must not only imagine and reflect upon their own future, but also coordinate and juxtapose it with the futures of others. Hence, imagining helps to facilitate a dialectical inquiry into alternative futures.

Dialectical synthesis

In this section, I describe how imagining enables strategists to address future-related tensions and contradictions, and discuss how tensions associated with proximity (near versus distant) and flow (continuous versus disruptive) can be synthesized via dialectical inquiry. In doing so, I build on insights on creative synthesis through imagining in strategy-making, which several scholars have outlined (Rindova & Martins, 2022, 2023; Szulanski & Amin, 2001).

Dialectical understanding of proximity through imagining

There has been continuous interest in unpacking the contradictions and tensions between the near and the distant future in the literature. A dialectical view emphasizes the connectivity between near and distant futures and their mutually constitutive nature, thereby helping social actors synthesize their perspectives related to proximity.

To illustrate these tensions and contradictions, one might consider the strategy-making process of a team that works on a long-term strategy for its organization. If, on the one hand, actors only anticipate the near future and concentrate their strategy-making efforts on what seems to be more predictable, they may need to consider the long-term opportunities, goals, and threats for their business. On the other hand, by only considering a distant future, such as a yet-to-be-created market that they wish to target, they may be able to develop innovative ideas in the strategy-making process. However, considering a market that does not currently exist could lead them to neglect opportunities. For example, Netflix’s strategy-making process during its pivot from DVD rentals to streaming illustrates the tension between focusing on the near future and envisioning the distant future. Initially, Netflix optimized its DVD service to serve predictable demand but also looked ahead to an emerging, uncertain digital streaming market. By maintaining short-term stability with DVD rentals while investing in streaming technology, Netflix positioned itself to lead in a new market. Later, Netflix synthesized these approaches by creating and streaming original content, securing its long-term relevance and market differentiation (Conlan, 2016).

Thus, a dialectical perspective offers an alternative approach that aims to achieve a more-than solution. Such an understanding helps actors address both near and distant futures by synthesizing their perspectives. Reconciling tensions and contradictions related to different perspectives on the proximity of the future may enable them to develop innovative solutions and identify further opportunities for strategy-making. For example, Slawinski and Bansal (2015) argued that organizations must bridge the gaps between short- and long-term goals in their sustainability strategies. To do so, organizations need to “juxtapose . . . the short- and long-term aspects of climate change decision making” (p. 544), thereby imagining dialectically how these tensions relate to one another to address both short-term financial goals and long-term sustainability goals.

In this context, imagining helps social actors “mak[e] the absent present” (Gümüsay & Reinecke, 2022, p. 3), understand how present futures guide daily activities, and further investigate how imagined futures influence actions in the present, providing an opportunity to alter the perception of what is possible through, for example, strategic narratives (Rindova & Martins, 2022). Instead of planning for a near, concrete future and a distant, more abstract future simultaneously, imagining opens the process of strategy-making to build on these tensions and enables social actors to imagine how the distant future influences the near future dialectically. Similarly, Beckert (2016a) argued that economic actions are only realized under conditions of high uncertainty. Because actors are “motivated in their actions by the imagined future state” (Beckert, 2013, p. 220), he concluded that “fictional expectations” of seemingly rational actors present the possibility of an alternative perspective on the economy and other areas of human activity to understand how imagined futures shape present decisions.

Augustine et al. (2019) provided an extensive example of imagining that led to a more-than synthesis in a longitudinal study of imaginaries in geoengineering. They insightfully mobilized a dialectical process to understand contested imaginaries and emerging syntheses. By increasingly engaging with an as-if reality through thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, actors were able to orient their actions toward the distant future. Dialectics enabled them to articulate new imaginaries and consider counterfactual existing imaginaries. Through such dialectal inquiry, actors could engage with a distant future as concrete and more credible, thereby increasing a collective interpretation of an as-if reality in this process. As a result, the authors showed how even the distant future can become a reference point for making sense of possible alternatives transcending previously existing options.

Dialectical understanding of flow through imagining

Flow-related tensions associated with different versions of the future have been broadly discussed in the literature. In most studies, the future is assumed to be continuous, and disruptions are treated as shocks (Roulet & Bothello, 2023). A dialectical perspective offers social actors an alternative lens to synthesize the tensions inherent to perceptions of the future as continuous versus disruptive to enable strategists to appreciate flow-related tensions. This approach involves recognizing that the future may be a partial continuation of the present while anticipating that it may be disruptive in other ways, thereby synthesizing these perspectives. Not engaging with alternative perspectives may lead actors to become path-dependent (Sydow et al., 2009); such has been the case in, for example, the strategy of the publishing industry (Koch, 2011), which had not anticipated the disruption of its business model wrought by social media. By contrast, if actors anticipate a future that is unceasingly discontinuous and disruptive, they need to alter their strategies continuously, rendering strategy-making a resource-intensive activity. They might conclude that an existing strategy should be radically changed to adapt to the future, but such an approach could lead them to disregard strategic decisions and activities that could be successful in the future.

For example, consider the tension-laden development of business activities during the global Covid-19 pandemic against the backdrop of a creeping crisis (Skade et al., 2025). On the one hand, the future seemed to be maximally disruptive; on the other hand, given the continuous limitations on everyday activities for organizations, the future seemed to unfold even more slowly than usual. Imagining the future helped actors involved in strategy-making consider a future that was neither solely continuous nor disruptive and captures a future in which many business activities are disrupted but enables them to continue daily business operations (Gibbert, 2010). A novel synthesis that differs from the tensions of continuing vs. disruptive future can be seen in Airbnb’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Faced with a dramatic decline in global travel, Airbnb created a new synthesis by merging the concepts of local experiences and health and safety measures. While its core business of short-term rentals was built around global tourism, the pandemic shifted the focus toward domestic, local travel as people sought safe getaways closer to home. Instead of merely adapting to short-term demand or focusing on long-term innovation, Airbnb combined these two ideas: offering local, safe vacation rentals while ensuring rigorous health and safety protocols. This synthesis led to a focus on “staycations,” where people could enjoy the experience of a getaway without the risks of international travel. Airbnb created a new market for short-distance travel experiences, which reshaped its business in ways that were not entirely predictable before the pandemic. This approach went beyond simply continuing or disrupting the existing model (Taulli, 2022). Similarly, during the pandemic, Zoom created a novel synthesis by merging business-focused tools with social connectivity. Originally a corporate video conferencing platform, Zoom adapted by adding features for personal use, such as virtual hangouts and family gatherings. This hybrid approach allowed Zoom to serve both professional and social needs, transforming it from a business tool into a platform for everyday communication. Rather than just continuing its core business or focusing on disruptive innovation, Zoom created a hybrid solution that reshaped how people connected in both work and personal contexts (Brue, 2023; Nolan, 2023).

Hence, imagining also can help actors overcome tensions between continuity and disruption by building on “retro-futurism [which] uses a narrative structure that imposes idealized elements of an imagined future from an earlier era on both the present and the future” (Suddaby et al., 2023, p. 32). In strategy-making, actors may anticipate that some strategic elements will be successful in the future and retain them while simultaneously rethinking other aspects of the strategy to prepare for a disruption of the market in which the organization operates. This concept relates to emergent strategies (Mintzberg & Waters, 1985; Mirabeau & Maguire, 2014) or autonomous strategic actions (Andriopoulos & Lewis, 2009), which depart from planned strategies and must be enacted together with induced strategic actions or deliberate strategies to create a novel way forward.

Stigliani and Ravasi (2012) described a similar approach by studying how actors in a design consulting firm were able to make sense of the future. Actors who engaged in prospective sensemaking by constructing artifacts about the future were able to overcome breakdowns in the sensemaking process associated with ambiguity about the future. Based on these findings, they outlined a dynamic process that involves synthesizing individual cognitive work with collective cognitive work to obtain new, dialectical insights and develop a shared understanding of the future despite its uncertain, ambiguous nature. This process is similar to imagining as it involves material aspects, i.e., artifacts, and cognitive activities.

In sum, imagining the flow of the future allows for novel approaches in strategy-making. Adopting a more-than approach and synthesizing creative outcomes requires understanding that the future does not unfold as solely continuous or as fully disruptive and enables “abstract imaginings of the future and crafting a realizable course of action” (Comi & Whyte, 2018, p. 1056). Consequently, the outcome of such a synthesis feeds back into future tensions about the future that strategists may experience as a recursive process.

Summarizing the generative potential of a dialectical inquiry

My analysis reveals how adopting a dialectical approach may address future-related tensions in strategy-making by shifting to a more-than perspective (Putnam, 2004), thereby capturing the complexity of futures. Importantly, I do not claim that imagining is always dialectical or that this approach is inherently superior to traditional approaches, as dialectical inquiry can also lead to unproductive conflicts and struggles (Farjoun & Fiss, 2022), as managers may resist rather than embrace contradictions (Hargrave & Van De Ven, 2017), since they may not be able to observe these tensions from the outside (Langley & Sloan, 2012). So, imagining may be one way to facilitate a dialectical approach, providing a unique perspective on the future.

Discussion and Implications

I have examined the future in the strategy-making process and explained how a dialectical perspective can be used to leverage inherent tensions and contradictions to potentially generate novel outcomes through imagining. Rather than “reduc[ing] complex relationships to ‘either/or’ polarities that downplay or neglect important interrelations, tensions, asymmetries and contradictions” (Collinson, 2020, p. 4), this approach focuses on synthesizing tensions, which fuel innovation (Garud et al., 2013) and strategic change (Pettit et al., 2023).

An alternative perspective on the future in strategy-making

Much of the strategy-making literature has suggested that the future unfolds linearly, is simply “out there” (see Lord et al., 2015, p. 263), and can be predicted and captured by the proper strategic means (see Wenzel, Krämer, et al., 2020). As a result, it “downplay[s] the future as something that actors in organizations can prepare or plan for” (Wenzel, 2022, p. 847). This theorizing frames the future as a deterministic temporal category, which can be perfectly predicted through foreseeing (Dane & George, 2014; Tsoukas & Shepherd, 2009), forecasting methods (Fergnani, 2022), wayfinding (Bouty et al., 2019), or scenario planning (Hodgkinson & Healey, 2008).

In contrast, I have explored a dialectic understanding to identify and embrace contradictions and tensions related to different perspectives of the future in strategy-making. When future-making practices are taken seriously, strategists are able to engage more fully with the uncertain and open future. This insight emphasizes that future-making practices are performative, because “rather than predicting a given future, their performance brings the future into being” (Wenzel, 2022, p. 848). This has important implications for strategy-making.

First, my theorization highlights how tensions and contradictions associated with the uncertainty of the future can be synthesized in the strategy-making process, thereby extending previous work that has yielded insights into how such tensions are approached (e.g., Bansal et al., 2022; Kaplan & Orlikowski, 2013; Reinecke & Ansari, 2015). Adopting a dialectical perspective reveals how strategists can engage with an uncertain future by leveraging “a set of situated discursive and non-discursive practices that are simultaneously enabling and constraining, coherent and contradictory, complex and simple, efficacious and ineffectual” (Mumby, 2005, p. 20). This approach helps strategists critically challenge existing perceptions of the future by engaging with alternative perspectives and striving for synthesis. This involves embracing contradictions and tensions and imagining alternatives to avoid an “imaginary crisis” (Mulgan, 2020).

Second, by showcasing imagining as a central future-making practice, I have outlined how future-related tensions can be synthesized, yielding novel and creative insights that may help actors move beyond existing solutions as showcased in the illustrative examples of companies such as Airbnb, Netflix, and Zoom. I have shown how and why it is essential to leverage generative conflicts, similar to the suggestion of harnessing “disciplined imagination” (Szulanski & Amin, 2001) in strategy-making. In doing so, this paper highlights that imagining is more than merely a cognitive activity but an embodied practice that enables strategists to engage with the future through their daily doings. It is important to identify how strategists can embrace the uncertainty of the future to welcome the “open” future that does not return solely to strategic planning, forecasting, or other relatively deterministic prediction methods.

Advancing a dialectical perspective that recognizes different perceptions of the future

Emerging literature focused on temporality in general (Hernes, 2022; Schultz & Hernes, 2013) and the future in particular has begun to showcase the value of studying the future as an emerging reality enacted by a multiplicity of social actors (Feuls et al., 2025; Lord et al., 2015; Rauch, 2025). This paper extends prior research to support a greater appreciation of the complexity of the future and future-making by exploring underlying processes and practices. Such a perspective supports reflexivity, as “the Future that we are talking about is our historically specific, modern Future—not any Future” (Gumbrecht, 2001, p. 54, emphasis in original).

First, my theorization contributes to emerging insights on dialectical inquiry processes. Building on concepts such as ambitemporality (Cuganesan, 2022; Reinecke & Ansari, 2015) and temporal translation (Hernes & Schultz, 2020), I have identified four perspectives of the future—incremental futures, expanding futures, punctuated futures, and speculative futures—that shape how social actors engage with future-related tensions and contradictions in the strategy-making process. Foregrounding underlying assumptions about the future has surfaced insights that provide a better understanding of how an uncertain future shapes the strategy-making process and may help strategists avoid common pitfalls.

Second, this study contributes to emerging work on future-making. Scholars have recently begun to investigate the future-making practices mobilized by organizational actors (Wenzel et al., 2025; Wickert, 2025). However, more work is required to explore which practices exist and how they are enacted. The dialectic perspective helps address this gap by explaining how imagining can help social actors recognize and leverage their agency to enact and juxtapose different perspectives of the future. Similarly, other researchers have begun investigating practices such as anticipating (Flyverbom & Garsten, 2021), wayfinding (Chia & Holt, 2006), foreseeing (Tsoukas & Shepherd, 2009), and projecting (Mische, 2009) as possible ways to engage with the unknown future. Examining how and why social actors enact their futures on a daily basis opens various opportunities to study the creation of better futures within and beyond organizations. This can enable researchers to understand different onto-epistemological ways of exploring the future (Beckert & Suckert, 2021).

Ways toward future research opportunities

This study presents several interconnected paths for future research. The dialectical perspective developed here highlights the generative role of tensions between competing organizational futures. To engage with this contribution, future research could deepen and clarify the investigation into these dynamics while broadening the societal implications. I suggest three directions for future inquiry that remain rooted in organizational contexts and strategy-making under uncertainty.

Tensions between futures: The plurality of organizational futures

By promoting a dialectical perspective on futures, this study has hinted at the importance of understanding the plurality of organizational futures. Much previous literature has suggested that the future is a single-level construct that objectively follows the present (see Koselleck, 2018). However, this literature has not fully addressed how a plurality of futures can co-exist in organizations; indeed, scholars have highlighted the lack of explanations for “the future in plural” (Beckert, 2016b). Although initial steps have been taken to address the need for multiple future constructions to shape strategic responses (Lê, 2013; Van Elk et al., 2025) and mechanisms for coordinating different futures (Tavory & Eliasoph, 2013), we know little about how a plurality of futures unfolds. Further investigation may provide a broader framework that outlines differences and similarities between possible futures (Flyverbom & Garsten, 2021), probable and desirable futures (see Gümüsay & Reinecke, 2022), anticipated and imagined futures (Beckert, 2013, 2016a, 2021), projected futures (Mische, 2009), and other future-related concepts, such as radical versus reformist futures, which come into being through various forms of innovating (Ettlie et al., 1984). As a result, future research could clarify how these divergent futures inform strategic decisions and create productive tensions within organizations.

Tensions within contexts: Grand challenges

Organizations increasingly operate in environments defined by large-scale uncertainties such as climate change, geopolitical shifts, and technological disruption (e.g., Ferraro et al., 2015; Jarzabkowski et al., 2022). As Whyte et al. (2022) described future-making as “an emancipatory inquiry aimed at imagining and reifying desirable futures”, a dialectical approach offers a valuable lens to study how organizations manage such tensions. It can facilitate further exploration of the evolving organizational futures, such as those related to climate change (Feuls et al., 2025) or wars (Rauch, 2025), to enable researchers to better understand how actors perceive and manage tensions between organizational futures linked to grand challenges.

Tensions within futures: Utopias and dystopias

Building on previous insights, the study of dialectics opens new pathways for our understanding of utopias (e.g., Bloch, 2000; Gümüsay & Reinecke, 2022), which are constructed by “projecting a better world into the future [to] render present-day problems more clearly” (Gordin et al., 2010, p. 1). Its adverse counterpart is a dystopia, a utopia gone awry. Previous organizational research has largely neglected to integrate the organizational implications of utopias and dystopias (Clegg et al., 2012), presenting fruitful opportunities for future research. For example, a dialectic perspective could be used to investigate how organizations can contribute to the construction of imagining utopian “alternative futures” (Gümüsay & Reinecke, 2022) and show the organizational relevance of imagined futures in how they render present tensions more visible or mobilize strategic action. This observation is in line with those of Augustine et al. (2019, p. 1956), who argued that the distant future “provides a lens into how utopian proposals . . . matter for creating our actual future.”

Conclusion

The future looks bright for studies of the future. Studying the concept of futures may have been regarded previously as a rather esoteric endeavour, yet a burgeoning literature on the human experience of the future has provided valuable insights for studying the process of strategy-making. I have studied the future from a strategy-making perspective and elaborated a dialectical view that appreciates and embraces inherent tensions to showcase the underlying practices of actors’ future-making. The future is ever-present in strategizing, and it remains consequential for organizational life. Therefore, we should embrace it in our theorizing.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I am deeply grateful to Editor Juliane Reinecke and the anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful engagement and developmental feedback. The paper has greatly benefited from this review process, and I thank them for their time and patience. Earlier versions of this paper benefited from discussions at the EGOS Standing Working Group on Organization & Time (2021), the OT Workshop (Winter 2021), the AOM 2024, and the Virtual Paper Sessions at European University Viadrina. I thank all participants for their insightful comments and encouragement. For their support and critique on earlier versions of the paper, I would like to acknowledge Blagoy Blagoev, Thomas Block, Gail Fairhurst, Tor Hernes, Paula Jarzabkowski, Moritz Kleinaltenkamp, Jochen Koch, Katie Meissner, Linda Putnam, Harry Sminia, Albrecht Söllner, Sarah Stanske, and Matthias Wenzel. This paper was shaped with the sounds of “When Doves Cry” (Prince) and “Little Bird” (Annie Lennox)—songs that reflect the tensions and imaginative openings toward uncertain futures at the core of this work.

ORCID iD

Lorenzo Skade

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author biography

Lorenzo Skade is a Senior Research Associate (postdoctoral researcher) at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder), Germany. His research interests include time and temporality, strategy-as-practice, and innovation. He is particularly interested in a process and practice-based perspective on these topics.

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