How Organizations Manage the Future

This chapter aims to increase our understanding of the ways in which forms of organizing the future can be observed and interpreted. In a first step, it outlines a system-theoretical perspective that provides a starting point to analyse how organizations refer to time by making decisions. Organizing is conceptualized as decision-making and decisions as present operations that split past and future with the ambition to affect the future. In a second step, this theoretical perspective is illustrated by an analysis of the historic discourse on decision-making with the aim to shed light on the modes of how decision-making and the production of time are intertwined in organizations. Whereas at the beginning of the last century, the concentration of past information was important for decision-making, the following decades have been more future-oriented. Today, an extreme concentration on future potential along with a ‘feel’ for the present becomes important.

Organizational creativity is essential in the face of an unknown future. In this chapter, we inspect pertinent philosophical insights into the problems and paradoxes of creation and creativity. To this end, we take care not to strain the concept of paradox, which is somewhat devalued through inflation, and to replace it, in many cases, with the concepts of complementarity, recursiveness and supplementarity. Although we refer mostly to continental philosophy, we use, rather than philosophical approaches, a selection criterion that includes problems such as the necessity of imagination of the future and, therefore, of creativity as a way to cope with its uncertainty and unknowledgeability; the tension between freedom and constraint; Plato’s search paradox; Jon Elster’s states that are not (directly) intendable; and, not least, the problem of the emergence of organizational creativity as a capacity of corporate actors. We start, however, by considering the role of escalating contingency and the opposition of creation and destruction in (hyper-)modernity and the implied ambivalence of creativity, which is recognized but mostly neglected within creativity research.

Taking organization as always underway—as temporally stretched out—entails a relation with what is yet to come. Orthodox strategy theory, despite its inner diversity, may be read wholly as responsive to the problematics of understanding and explaining this crucial relation. And organizational sensemaking theory, although it flows from a critique of orthodox strategy theory, may be read as responsive to the same problematics. These prominent perspectives not only share a problematics but are also thoroughly committed to organizational knowing as the basis for approaching it. However, the primacy of this commitment has itself become doubly problematic in an age of higher-order contingency. Organizational knowing can no longer be taken for granted as the sole, or even the most fundamental, basis for effecting and sustaining the organizational engagement with what is yet to come. If knowing is always an attenuated means for effecting and sustaining this engagement, what gives rise to it as crucial? If not solely in knowing, where else might its sustenance be found? In response to this line of questioning the notion of organizational futurity is offered as a speculative opening.

A common assumption in management studies is that organizations try to reduce the uncertainty of the future by accurate prediction and planning. This assumption is increasingly challenged by the much broader research on temporal and especially future-oriented practices. We build upon this line of research and argue that organizational practices of openness present paradigmatic examples of future-oriented practices. Using the two most prominent bundles of organizational practices of openness, open innovation (which includes crowdsourcing and corporate incubating) and open strategy (which includes transparent and inclusive strategizing), we demonstrate how opening up for the future helps organizations to develop new and uncertainty-reducing links between present and future. We close with a discussion on the limits of openness as a practice to address uncertainty.

Strategic organizational change is a complex, future-oriented phenomenon that is critical for any organization. Traditional means of inquiry have struggled with the difficulty of capturing the future; thus, the methods for managing things to come remain scarce. In this chapter, we contribute to managing strategic change, and thereby the future of the organization, by developing the Story Index (SIX) method. The method facilitates a better understanding of how organizational change takes shape in the discursive reality before materializing in concrete terms. SIX is an analytical process combining antenarratives and narrative rationality to reveal the emerging meanings and rationales of change at different organizational levels resonating positively or negatively with the future.

For organizations, the main rationale for exploring possible future developments is the imperative to sustain achievements and further progress towards organizational objectives. Deep uncertainty about the future, however, means that those hypothetical future developments are products of organizations’ sense-making processes. Much effort in organizational and methodological research is focused on questions that look into the future, to explore the possible future contextual environment for organizations (scenarios) and to draw out implications. However, less attention is often paid to how methodological choices for developing scenarios influence the way organizations make sense of their future.

This chapter presents a research methodology for critically examining organizations’ sense-making processes that also points to a more reflexive way of exploring organizations’ scenarios. Here, the responsibility of both researchers and practitioners is not only to ask how concrete future developments may affect an organization but also to inquire how the notion of a particular possible development made its way into an organizational scenario, how a set of alternative scenarios would look without it and what other possible developments have been excluded. Such critical reflections on the assumptions and practices that have shaped the development of alternative scenarios are common under poststructuralist thinking, which has often been derided as ‘impractical’ in that its critiques exclude actual scenario development processes. However, we argue that investigating organizational futures from a poststructural perspective is of practical relevance: the methodologies that an organization uses to make sense of the future ultimately shape the kinds of scenarios that an organization accepts as plausible and actively prepares for.

To bridge the gap between the worlds of scenario development and poststructural critique, we introduce Cross-Impact Balance Analysis (CIB), a method of inquiry that not only has the potential to operationalize critical, poststructuralist reflections, but is also capable of integrating those reflections back into organizations’ scenario development processes to improve how organizations address the deep uncertainty about their future.

This chapter makes the case for the use of historical methods as a way of examining how organizations manage the future. Historical methods correspond to the study of the past through an analysis of historical documentation. This chapter offers an overview of the ontology of time and temporality and the epistemology of historical methods to explain how a focus on the past can help us to study how historical actors made sense of possible futures, how they enacted the(ir) future and how they organized for the future. It also covers some of the challenges of using historical documentation and presents principles that should be used when drawing on this type of evidence to study how organizations manage the future.

High-hazard organizations are unique due to their susceptibility to disasters that can have grave consequences not just for the organization but also for stakeholders, the communities in which they operate and the environment. Though prominence is placed on understanding how high-hazard organizations avoid such events, how they create a new future when such an event does occur is underexplored. The purpose of this chapter, thus, is to investigate how organizations create a new future in the wake of a disaster through resilient organizing. Using an instrumental case study methodology, this study investigates how executives at British Petroleum (BP), a high-hazard organization, embodied resilient organizing following the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. We show how resilient organizing helped BP bounce back and beyond by learning from the disaster, finding resolve, refocusing and experiencing transformation through action. In doing so, BP endeavored to prepare for, build, cultivate and commit to a new future. Insights from this research point to resilient organizing as a promising strategy for creating a new future and suggest future avenues for research on resilient organizing in high-hazard contexts and beyond.

This chapter deals with the recent darkening of the future horizon in the global fight against pandemics. Since roughly the year 2000, the World Health Organization has collaborated with a large number of local actors and made a concentrated effort to protect the world’s population against emerging infectious diseases, such as severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), swine flu, Ebola and Zika. Although efforts have been made so that the spread of future infectious diseases will be contained through early intervention, the actors in charge anticipate that the extant measures will fail to some degree. They believe it is simply impossible to prevent all pandemics from happening. But steps can and should be taken to lessen the impact of an unavoidable pandemic through emergency preparation. This chapter deals with organizations and organizational networks as key actors in these processes of emergency planning. Without the capacity of organizations to produce binding decisions for their members, which makes planning for an uncertain future possible, pandemic preparedness would not be feasible—especially not on a global scale.

This chapter examines how organizations cope with and handle the temporal mode of the future in the light of digital transformation. Despite the importance of organizing for the future, we still lack an understanding of which processes and practices organizations use to manage the future. To this end, one of the most pervasive challenges in today’s organizational landscape is that of coping with the issues imposed by the ever-increasing need to face digitalization. Actors are able to reveal the practices and processes used to actually manage digital transformation, venturing beyond accounts that merely sketch the future as a digitalized, imagined state. We address this challenge through an explorative in-depth case study, observing how a set of innovation networks in Germany developed new city management concepts in a collaborative fashion to generate an intelligent and sustainable city of the future. Our analysis shows that innovation networks offer an at least partially generalizable account of how to engage different actors to collaborate on the challenges of the future. Building on these observations, we add to the extant literature on organizing for the future by (1) revealing practices and processes used to actually manage the digital transformation, and (2) providing a phase framework that offers an at least partially generalizable account of how to engage different actors to collaborate on the challenges of digitalization. Moreover, (3) our insights focus, at least indirectly, attention on cities as informative urban laboratories that engage with digitalization, offering an alternative setting to study when compared to the more usual settings of digitalization efforts, such as companies or crowds.

Managing futures in the semiconductor industry is heavily predicated on their collective creation. Shared expectations need to be developed, technological options evaluated and strategic plans made. Our study is based on in-depth and long-term qualitative empirical research and examines how social and technical futures are created by organizing field-configuring events such as roadmaps and conferences. We view these events as part of the institutional work and institutional life within the organizational field of semiconductor manufacturing. Our analysis shows how the collective practices of creating and managing contested futures evolve in the field and how they configure specific modes of reflexive self-regulation. We draw on institutional and practice theory in order to contribute to a more general understanding of the collective practices of future-making and to situate them within overarching issues of legitimation, signification and domination.

Whereas the temporal mode of an organization’s past and present relies on material representations, an organization’s future has no material equivalent. Hence, the future of an organization is an ideal but not yet materialized phenomenon. In this chapter, we adopt a process perspective on organizational artifacts, their ongoing production and reproduction. We focus on how an organization’s past and present performance is inscribed into an organizational artifact and we explore how this process materializes as a pre-presentation of things to come. In doing so, we explore how performances resonate in artifacts and how artifacts in turn pre-present an organization’s future. Our study is based on an in-depth and longitudinal qualitative research design conducted in the field of haute cuisine and focuses on the ongoing development process of the menu as the central artifact.

In organization studies, office architecture is mostly seen as an instrument for control and productivity. By taking into account the temporality of architecture within labour relations, an imagined dimension of the organization’s built space comes to the fore. For a better understanding of this dimension, this chapter turns to architectural theory, especially Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project. Using an approach grounded in discourse analysis and ethnography, the chapter presents four dimensions in which office architecture relates to the future: (1) office architecture is discursively charged with promises; (2) it produces conflicting anticipations of the future; (3) architectural aspirations have to be performed locally; and (4) office architecture stages labour’s inexhaustible potentiality. These dimensions imply that office architecture cannot be sufficiently understood only in terms of its functionality or instrumentality. Instead of simply assuring an objective technological rationalization, office architecture produces a shared imaginary of an ever more successful organization of labour.