Making futures that matter: Future making, online working and organizing remotely

Abstract

Future making is the work of making sense of possible and probable futures, and evaluating, negotiating and giving form to preferred ones. Practices of making futures are increasingly online. Yet, as organizational participants come together online – organizing remotely to make offline futures – they lack the shared experiential knowledge that is gained through embodied and situated practices. In this essay, we argue that the lack of experiential knowledge makes future making online difficult to organize and vulnerable to excluding relevant expertise; dialogue may become inward-looking and self-referential within the online environment, with an emotional and cognitive distance from the futures being made outside of such representations. We draw on the pragmatist tradition to theorize online future making, to articulate its dynamics and the challenges that arise, and to suggest remedial actions. By conceptualizing future making as a form of inquiry – as a distributed and reflective process that proceeds through engagement with representations of the future – we identify three remedial actions for online future making: to solicit feedback, juxtapose alternatives and change medium. These remedial actions seek to compensate for the lack of shared experiential knowledge by both sustaining the online involvement of heterogeneous remote participants and by bringing in relevant (offline) places, people and materials to online future making.

Identification of Knowledge Management Barriers in Scientific R&D Projects in Czech Academic Environment

“…A project is a "temporary endeavor to create a service, product or exclusive results" [18]. Projects are future-oriented forms of organizing [19]. They must adapt quickly to the environment, such as providing new infrastructure or adapting transport [20].…”

Transforming Visions into Actions: Strategic change as a future-making process

“…Our conceptual model eschews traditional and linear conceptions of strategic change, where plans precede adaptation, by adopting the idea that organizations are continuously moving towards the future (Tsoukas & Chia, 2002). We illustrate that future making involves both imagining and giving form to desired futures (Whyte et al, 2022), where, consistent with a change vision, participants act in future ways in the present. We argue that shaping intentions guide the imagining and adapting activities in each future-making cycle and our conceptualization of cycles captures the iterative, and at times concurrent, nature of these activities.…”

“…Tools can include strategic plans (Beckert, 2021), abstract visions (Comi & Whyte, 2018) and beliefs (Lê, 2013). Organizational members use these tools as they act and interact (Wenzel et al, 2020; Whyte et al, 2022). A future-making perspective shares the emphasis with strategic change research on the need for guided actions.…”

“…Future making, defined as ‘the work of making sense of possible and probable futures, and evaluating, negotiating and giving form to preferred ones’ (Whyte, Comi, & Mosca, 2022, p. 2), emphasizes that situated actions in the present make the future (Comi & Whyte, 2018; Wenzel, Krämer, Koch, & Reckwitz, 2020). A growing body of work reveals how desired futures are envisioned (Augustine, Soderstrom, Milner, & Weber, 2019; Thompson & Byrne, 2022; Whyte et al, 2022), and how within an abstract vision, future-making practices give form to ‘realizable courses of action’ (Comi & Whyte, 2018, p. 1055). There is, however, little empirical evidence outlining how, in circumstances of strategic change, a vision for a desired future is transformed into ways of working.…”

Why Decenter Images of the Future Matter: Absences, Alternatives, and Accomplishments Challenging Future Visions

“…We propose in this special issue to center “images of the future” as core notions of dialogue about futurability and futurity in the spaces of science, technology, and innovation. Furthermore, we believe that to de-center images of the future is a pathway to observe and value alternatives in future making (Thomson and Bryne, 2022; Whyte et al, 2022) that allows both communities to appreciate the scales and diversity of imaginations, outside hegemonic discourses and “monofutures” (Luba, 2017; Mitchell and Chaudhury, 2020) that colonize our imaginations with unfeasible ideas that one-size-fits-all. We are convinced that there are not just multiple futures (List, 2006; Slaugher, 2020), but also that all images of futures require a critical examination to be able to achieve, to some degree, the transformational aspirations of creatives, thinkers, and imagineers (McCray, 2012).…”