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.

Introduction

Future making is the work of making sense of possible and probable futures, and evaluating, negotiating and giving form to preferred ones (Adam & Groves, 2007; Comi & Whyte, 2018; Tutton, 2017; Wenzel, Krämer, Koch, & Reckwitz, 2020). Practices of making futures that previously relied on face-to-face interactions are increasingly online. Such online practices contrast markedly with the offline practices of future making, where organizational participants assemble in person to make sense collectively and to imagine and discuss preferred futures (Vaara & Whittington, 2012). As organizations increasingly use online future-making practices to make offline futures at a time of ‘grand challenges’ such as climate change, loss of biodiversity, pandemics and fires, we use this essay to articulate the dynamics and the challenges that arise in online future-making practices. We argue that the use of online settings alone makes it difficult to achieve preferred futures and we suggest remedial actions.

Our main concern is that online future making lacks the shared experiential knowledge that is central to offline future making. Consider a manager sitting at home, interacting with their team through a video conference. Each team member appears on the manager’s screen, accessing the meeting through a computer or smartphone. The manager is remote from the office and the team, perhaps sitting at a dining table, with a coffee, glancing out of their window. To bring into being a preferred future, a set of graphs and analyses may be shared through the screen and used to discuss an interrelated set of concerns, spanning from how to respond to grand challenges, to how to address risks and opportunities and how to organize in the face of unpredictable demands. However, what is missing from, and hard to recover in, this online setting is the embodied organizational practices through which the team would otherwise share experiential knowledge: the visceral experiences that enable participants to engage empathetically as well as cognitively with the places, people and materials involved in offline futures, and to do so collectively and in close physical proximity to others.

We contrast these online experiences with the offline practices of future making in organizations, which have developed to create engaging, open and ‘safe’ organizational spaces for participants to build mutual trust, co-create something new and have meaningful conversations about futures that are better for organizations and societies. As an example of an offline practice, the strategy meeting or workshop (e.g. Hodgkinson, Whittington, Johnson, & Schwarz, 2006; Jarzabkowski & Seidl, 2008; Paroutis, Franco, & Papadopoulos, 2015) provides in many instances a highly participatory and inclusive experience, often facilitated in a dedicated space (Hodgkinson et al., 2006). Here, participants, arriving with diverse embodied and situated experiences, develop shared experiential knowledge by engaging emotionally as well as cognitively (Johnson, Prashantham, Floyd, & Bourque, 2010) with each other, with the places that they inhabit and with materials such as flipcharts, pens and post-it notes. These enable an open-ended dialogue through which to explore and question possible futures and to discuss which are preferred.

Prior work in organizational research has drawn attention to the shared experiential knowledge that ensues from co-located and situated practices (e.g. Nicolini, 2012; Reckwitz, 2002; Schatzki, Knorr Cetina, & Von Savigny, 2005) where participants interact with physical artefacts to design and strategize for the future (Comi & Whyte, 2018; Ewenstein & Whyte, 2009; Jarzabkowski, Spee, & Smets, 2013; Orlikowski, 2007). This shared experiential knowledge is embodied and sense-based: ‘It comes from practitioners understanding the look, feel, smell, taste and sound of things in organizational life’ (Ewenstein & Whyte, 2007: 689). Offline, such embodied, sense-based engagement with artifacts is engrossing and exciting; providing an emotional basis for work (Knorr Cetina, 2001, p. 187). However, when future-making practices go online, they become, we argue, vulnerable to excluding relevant experiential knowledge. If we cast future making as a form of joint inquiry, this is because, as participants become remote from the workplace and access online practices from dispersed locations, there is a tendency for dialogue to become inward-looking and self-referential within that online environment. A lack of experiential knowledge in online future making generally leads to an emotional and cognitive distance from the futures being made outside it. As participants lose shared experiential knowledge, they may become disengaged, finding it harder to sustain their own involvement in making preferred organizational futures and harder to bring in relevant offline places, people and materials. This is problematic when offline futures are being made in online future-making practices: it risks leading to ill-fated or dystopic futures because such online future-making practices lack the sensory and bodily engagement with the offline future in the making as well as the associated reflection and deliberation that are needed to take responsibility for outcomes. Remedial actions become necessary, we argue, as organizations go online, so as to compensate for this lack of shared experiential (sense-based and embodied) knowledge in online future-making practices. Such remedial actions are crucial to making sense of, evaluating, negotiating and giving form to preferred futures online.

We draw on the pragmatist tradition to explain how we interpret online future making through framing future making as a process of inquiry; and we also explain how this framing suggests the remedial actions necessary to support such practices online. First, we introduce future making as a deliberative, non-rationalistic account of the future, distinguishing it from other accounts (foreseeing and wayfinding), and outlining the role of inquiry in making preferred futures. Second, we discuss remoteness and its consequences for future making offline and online, with particular attention to shared experiential knowledge (and the lack thereof in online future making). Third, we outline the remedial actions that we propose to compensate for the lack of shared experiential (that is, reduction in sense-based, embodied) knowledge in online future making. These remedial actions are to solicit feedback, juxtapose alternatives, and change media to sustain the engagement and involvement of remote participants in the process of inquiry involved in making preferred organizational futures and to bring in relevant people, places and materials to the online future making. Finally, we summarize our contribution, discussing its importance to strands of organization theory on futures, and specifically the quest to address ‘grand challenges’ and offer resilient organizational responses to the futures that societies now face.

Future Making

To set up our case for the remedial actions for online future making, in this section we outline how we conceptualize future making as a form of inquiry; namely, as a distributed and reflective process that proceeds through engagement with representations of the future. Below, we first position future making as a non-rationalistic approach to the future and then, second, articulate how it is conceptualized as a form of inquiry.

Positioning future making as a non-rationalistic approach to the future

Early research on organizational futures emphasized rational planning, calculation and forecasting as approaches to managing the future; however, scholars have recently sought to develop more socialized and less rationalistic explanations that reject the ‘forward march of progress’ (Wenzel et al., 2020, pp. 6–7) and sense of control created by planning practices (e.g. Chia & Holt, 2009; Tsoukas & Shepherd, 2004). Such non-rationalistic approaches recognize the uncertainty and plurality of possible futures. The future no longer is available to be disciplined and controlled through planning (e.g. Kornberger, 2013). Instead the future is viewed as incompletely knowable, problematic and open-ended (Wenzel et al., 2020). While we can expect the sun to rise tomorrow, our institutions to persist, our work routines to be similar, we may not know exactly what the day holds for us, and this is not fully under our control. Underlying these non-rationalistic accounts of the future are insights from the pragmatist tradition (whereby knowing and agency in the world are inseparable from one another) and relatedly from the phenomenological tradition, grounded in individual experiences of the world. Both the pragmatist and phenomenological traditions draw on Kant’s (1987 [1790]) work on sensed, conceptualized experience as a departure from the Cartesian mind–body divide. From this perspective, we are not disembodied brains: all lived experience and engagement with the world is situated, located in places that we inhabit and that become meaningful to us.

Drawing on this pragmatist tradition, we define future making as a form of inquiry that engages with representations of the future (which may be visual or verbal) while being present in the world (Comi & Whyte, 2018). The future becomes partially ‘made’ available for consideration in the present: it is re-presented, made present verbally in narratives or through visual texts, pictures, or notations such as graphs. ¹ Representations enable participants to engage with such futures, making judgements and seeking to develop, directly and indirectly, their preferred futures.

By placing the emphasis on practical engagement with one another and with material artefacts, future making differs from previous approaches that have similarly moved away from a rationalistic perspective on the future – most notably foreseeing (Tsoukas & Shepherd, 2004) and wayfinding (Beyes & Holt, 2020; Chia & Holt, 2006, 2009). Organization scholars of foreseeing have sought, in various ways, to reconceptualize organizational ‘foresight’ to develop a non-rationalistic perspective that views the future as an emergent and unpredictable outcome of myriad interactions (e.g. Blackman & Henderson, 2009; Cunha, 2004; Tsoukas & Shepherd, 2004). Such a move takes one away from the rationalist origins of the notion of ‘foresight’ in which the future is ‘seen’ by extrapolating the past through prediction and strategic planning. Tsoukas and Shepherd (2004) draw on the pragmatist tradition of Whitehead (1933) to articulate foreseeing as a capability to deal with any events that might occur in the future, by grasping features in the present that are likely to shape trends in the future (Tsoukas & Shepherd, 2004, p. 2). They turn to the phenomenological tradition, using the Heideggerian notion of coping to frame foreseeing as ‘a pervasive, background organizational skill, not a focal act’ (Tsoukas & Shepherd, 2004, p. 10 [emphasis in original]). Yet, while this explanation emphasizes the tacit nature of foresight, involving subsidiary awareness, it also suggests the utility of deliberate organizational strategies – forecasting, contingency planning, scenario planning and analogical reasoning. The use of these strategies and their associated forms of representation depends on anticipatory knowledge of events and how to act on them, with forecasting used where certainty of events and how to act is presumed and analogical reasoning where these presumptions do not hold. Mobilizing an idea from neuroscience, Tsoukas and Shepherd further suggest that ‘memories of the future’ ² can be produced that provide a jolt and spur to action (Tsoukas & Shepherd, 2004, p. 7). Hence, this work encompasses diverse understandings of the future and the actions that might be useful to take in relation to such different conceptions.

As an alternative concept, wayfinding is instead about indirect action (Chia & Holt, 2006), to achieve goals through accommodation and adjustment from current positions. In this sense, wayfinding captures how participants cope with the future while accommodating its emergent and uncertain character (Bouty, Gomez, & Chia, 2019; Chia & Holt, 2009; Nayak & Chia, 2011). It is a skilled performance in which participants draw on habituated perception to ‘feel their way’ across ‘a world that is itself in motion’ (Ingold, 2000, p. 155). Their practical coping is realized through local orientation, adaptation and improvisation, moving towards an uncertain future (Chia & Holt, 2006). In their account of wayfinding, Chia and Holt (2009, pp. 137–8) frame ‘building’ and ‘dwelling’ as distinct modes through which strategists engage with the world. Chia and Holt (2006) describe how participants act purposively (rather than purposefully) by drawing on what is directly available in the practices in which they are immersed, ‘dwelling’ in the practices (Heidegger, 1962; 1971 [1951]). Using the example of a blind person and their stick, Chia and Holt (2006, p. 641) argue that participants in a practice dwell in the tools they use, apprehending them experientially, as an extension of their body, rather than cognitively. They contrast this with ‘building’ (which they qualify as ‘without dwelling’, p. 139) as the usual approach of the strategist, using deliberate and planned actions, where ‘building’ involves direct action, in which the strategist consciously constructs mental representations and then acts on these (Ingold, 2000, p. 133).

Both the approaches of foreseeing and wayfinding tend to dismiss artefacts as fixed and prescriptive, while also emphasizing a latent engagement with the world as a background skill. In contrast, in future making, organizations learn across a cluster of future making practices (Wenzel, in press) through engaging with mutable artefacts that partially represent those futures. In what follows, we take a closer look at future making as a form of inquiry that unfolds around representations and unpack its role in making preferred futures.

Conceptualizing future making as a form of inquiry

Drawing on the pragmatist perspective, we conceptualize future making as a form of inquiry. Here, diverse participants use representations in a distributed and reflective practice to collectively make sense of, evaluate, negotiate and give form to a preferred future. Preferred futures are in line with the idea of an inquiry treated as doubtful, indeterminate and open to revision (Dewey, 1938; Knorr Cetina, 1997; Schön, 1984); as essentially a focus for prospective sensemaking (e.g. Maitlis & Christianson, 2014). Such an inquiry-based process of future making is also participatory, enabling diverse participants to coordinate, learn and change evaluations of the future, without however needing to agree (Ferraro, Etzion, & Gehman, 2015). The inquiry itself is often initiated by an indeterminate situation, a puzzle that becomes framed as a problem, prompting curiosity and action (Dewey, 1938). Such an indeterminate situation raises a doubt and in turn motivates questioning through an emotional and creative engagement with creating incomplete representations of futures.

Future making as inquiry is also a hands-on and generative practice (Ewenstein & Whyte, 2007; Schön, 1984) where participants engage with the materials at hand to craft and form what is not yet there. It is a collective process of inductive reasoning – drawing inferences from a situation to arrive at a judgement, having considered a ‘series of partial and tentative judgments’ (Dewey, 1997 [1910], p. 101). We argue that figuring out futures cannot be achieved through a background process but needs mindful attention. Inquiry, in fact, is only possible in practices of future making that are structured and organized to represent futures as open to question, and avoids the view of representations as complete and unavailable for questioning.

Examples of future making practices in organizations include strategy, design, research, or project work (cf. Comi & Whyte, 2018). Across clusters of future making practices, participants evaluate the representations of the future using different criteria. They may appeal to characteristics such as ‘Prices, technical efficiency, reputation, fame, collective solidarity, inspiration’ (Thévenot, 2002, p. 61) as relevant evaluation criteria for preferred organizational futures. Rather than focusing on how they justify their diverse judgements, a focus on inquiry instead draws attention to the potential to defer judgement and engage in ways that opens up yet other values for deliberation and questioning (Ferraro et al., 2015). Such a process then enables participants to question and reconsider their initial understandings and potentially reaching a new synthesis by working through a series of partial and tentative judgements. Treating represented futures as provisional and incomplete sustains the engagement of diverse participants, enabling them to question assumptions, discuss and negotiate different preferred futures. Such reasoning is not easy but ‘a laborious achievement of habit needing to be continually worked over’ (Dewey, 1922, p. 198). Judgement closes active areas of inquiry by resolving and treating aspects of the representation of the future as more or less complete, and such representations then cease to be a focus of the ongoing work of future making.

One challenge to future making as inquiry is that imagined scenarios can seem complete prematurely, giving a false sense of control and limiting organizations’ ability to sustain a further process of deliberation. For example, the United States and United Kingdom were rated as the first and second most prepared countries for a pandemic in 2019 (GHS, 2019) because they had engaged extensively in scenario building. Yet, as it turned out, they had prepared for a flu-like pandemic and were not prepared to deal with the real-world consequences of the Covid-19 outbreak, and then appeared to lack both the flexibility to adapt scenarios and the ability to implement a response. Writing about future plans for disaster recovery, Clarke (1999, p. 16) similarly notes that: ‘Some plans are highly instrumental, but others are little more than vague hopes for remote futures and have almost no known connection with human capacity or will.’ He describes the vague hopes as ‘fantasy documents’, which ‘can be remarkably coherent, though the coherence is internal and thus uncomplicated by external forces and ambiguity’ (Clarke, 1999, p. 17). Without being subjected to external scrutiny, such assumptions can be retained in ways that make plans ill-adapted to reality.

We find the potential role of inquiry (Dewey, 1938; Knorr Cetina, 1997; Schön, 1984) in future making, with its associated reflection, questioning, creativity, curiosity and focus, to be underplayed in existing explanations. Inquiry conceives of future making as dialogical in structure: it is described by Schön as a ‘conversation with the situation’ (Schön, 1984, p. 26). Work on foreseeing and wayfinding advocates subsidiary awareness in the present and treats representations as mental constructs, as fixed and as primarily used to determine action. By contrast, in considering future making as inquiry, we draw attention to the ongoing cognitive and performative use of material artefacts as well as the talk around them. The use of such artefacts opens up sensemaking and allows participants to critically question what is known, engaging the senses (Ewenstein & Whyte, 2007) with both focal attention and subsidiary awareness, learning from indeterminate situations as they arise and become represented. The casting of future making in terms of inquiry enables interrogation of the deliberative practices of organizational participants and making the construction of possible futures-as-representations a focal concern.

The term future making draws attention to 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. Deliberation and inquiry are useful in flexibly remaking futures in which ‘deliberation is an experiment in finding out what the various lines of possible action are really like’ (Dewey, 1922, p. 190). Here ‘making’ can involve collectively making sense of an indeterminate situation, evaluating, negotiating and giving form to preferred futures in an inquiry. Such a process suspends conclusions, it involves judgement (Thévenot, 2002, 2011) in valuing options and making choices but such judgement is provisional in an ongoing inquiry. Participants engage in forms of reflection that orient and anticipate new forms of activity and valuation through learning and development (Miettinen, 2006). Such inquiry is temporal in nature, not only because it takes time, but also because it progresses. The focus of inquiry changes over time, as questions become resolved and new questions arise.

Framing future making as inquiry draws attention to how futures become foregrounded by being represented verbally and visually, how they are given attention and made sense of, and how preferred futures are negotiated. While we may only have subsidiary awareness of the places that we inhabit and materials we use, they underlie our ability to act and to give focal attention to issues of concern (Stone, 2013). Representations are made sense of through giving them focal attention within our embodied practice in the world and the judgements that we make, drawing directly on that experiential knowledge. This framing of future making as inquiry is thus distinct from that of theorists who describe the future as tacit, latent and immanent in the present (Adam & Groves, 2007), as an experiential vector that unfolds in strategy work (Vesa & Frank, 2013), or as a sensitivity (Tsoukas & Shepherd, 2004). The focus on an inquiry through engaging with representations also distinguishes our explanation from the work that explores how organizations use diverse representations in forms of anticipatory governance to consider near and distant futures (Flyverbom & Garsten, 2021), but does not theorize the processes of engaging with these various forms of representations. Further it also differs from work on instruments of imagination to proactively shape futures (Beckert, 2021). While this prior work focuses on how instruments are used to secure financial resources from stakeholders through prospective stories of success, our work has a distinctive focus on how futures are made, through the generative doubt that sustains inquiry across a broad set of concerns.

While we are presenting future making as a participative, reflective and unfolding inquiry, we are aware of the manifold challenges that participants encounter in sustaining such practices. In many instances, inquiry fails – this may be because participants cannot find a resolution to unfolding questions or a way to synthesize their diverse values and understandings. Also, inquiry is challenged when participants cannot come to a judgement they can justify and agree on, when their reasoning is cut short and stifled by power struggles, and when they are unable to bear or withstand criticism of accepted orthodoxies. In its ideal sense, future making is best achieved through an inclusive process that enables critical thinking and the questioning of long-held assumptions and values. We know that judgements about which futures are preferred and enacted by organizations are also ethical in nature, based in morality (Adam & Groves, 2007), with the ethical implications of futures stretching out across scales, from near to distant times and places (Adam, 2009). While our interest is in future making in general, in the context of current challenges we are particularly interested in how instances of future making connect strategies to grand challenges, for example, where organizations, own strategies, finances and plans raise questions about their wider environmental, societal and material implications. Our ambition here is not only to set out an idealized picture of how inquiry can provide a means through which preferred futures can be realized, but also to consider how the challenges that arise in future making as inquiry can be addressed, as it goes online. This interest was triggered by the global Covid-19 pandemic, but is also motivated by broader trends such as the digitalization of work that mean that future making is increasingly done online or in hybrid forms, with some participants together and others at remote geographical locations. In the following section, we turn our attention to remoteness and the challenges it entails in making preferred futures in organizational practices online.

Remoteness and Shared Experiential Knowledge in Online Future Making

In this section, we explicate remoteness in online environments and the challenges it poses for the build-up of shared experiential knowledge about futures that are ‘in the making’ (Adam, 2009). While shared experiential knowledge (embodied and sense-based) is integral to the work that people do and to any futures they are collectively able to imagine and realize (Comi & Whyte, 2018), this is severely hampered in online environments where sensorial experiences are mediated and participants are remote from each other as well as from the places and materials that constitute organizational life. Online, looking at the screen is not just the context for future making but becomes constitutive of the practice itself: participants are embodied in their interactions with the computer but are remote from one another, lacking shared experiential knowledge. This makes participants vulnerable to becoming morally disengaged from remote futures, potentially in unrecognized ways, and may hence nudge them (some or all of the participants) toward domination from a distance. We conclude that this can have detrimental consequences for organizations and societies alike, potentially leading to the creation of limited, dystopic, unworkable and unsustainable futures – the kind of futures that have been seen as possible from afar with limited deliberation on their consequences but may not be preferred by those who come to inhabit them.

Remoteness, shared experiential knowledge, online and offline environments

All future-making practices, whether conducted online or offline, involve that which is near and that which is remote. While the future itself remains remote, some aspects of the practice are experienced, sensed and near to hand in the present, through our bodily engagement with the world and manipulation of verbal and visual representations of the future (Comi & Whyte, 2018). In an offline strategy workshop, for instance, a team member may stand at a flipchart, writing and drawing to prompt and capture other participants’ ideas about the future in a sketchy format that will be available for further change. This embodied and sense-based experience, in turn, leads to the development of collective, hands-on knowledge (Ewenstein & Whyte, 2007) about preferred futures, which we call ‘shared experiential knowledge’.

We argue that shared experiential knowledge, emerging from the sensorial and reflective engagement in practices of future making as inquiry, is central to making futures that matter. It enables participants to think anew, by acting on subtle cues that arise from them understanding the experiential knowledge they gain from their senses (Ewenstein & Whyte, 2007). Through the engrossing engagement with verbal and visual representations of the future, such representations invite exploration, prompt questions and maintain interaction (Knorr Cetina, 1997). A flipchart in a strategy workshop, for instance, acts as a multivocal inscription (Ferraro et al., 2015) that enables different perspectives on preferred futures to be captured and valued. In this ideal context of future making, participants build shared knowledge based on their experience of being physically present, interacting with each other and the materials at hand. They could, for instance, get up from the roundtable and take turns to write or draw onto the flipchart. As they interact around the flipchart, they could get insights from reflecting on their unfolding representations of preferred futures, and from engaging emotionally through laughter, smiles and even small and back talks. As Oakley (2007, p. 16) describes, ‘our being in the world depends utterly on the body’s physicality’.

In online environments, however, the build-up of shared experiential knowledge is more difficult as participants are remote from each other, and their shared bodily and sensorial experiences are digitally mediated. While there are tools that enable participation online (e.g. Microsoft Teams), shared experiences are reduced because ways of knowing are dislocated across places (Ropo, Sauer, & Salovaara, 2013). Here, participants lack the subtle cues derived from being near each other, from getting a feeling of organizational places and their atmospheres, and from touching, manipulating and sensing materials. Their bodies – apprehended through digital mediation rather than direct experience – become abstracted from, rather than complicit in the sensemaking (de Rond, Holeman, & Howard-Grenville, 2019, p. 1962). While online environments do provide a form of embodiment – albeit mediated by the computer, screen and camera – this, we argue, does not result in the same experience of being there, near and engaged as in offline future making. For instance, the manager in the video conference of our introductory vignette sits alone at the table, being remote from workplace and colleagues. Engaging in online future making through the computer, what this manager may miss is a sense of who is not engaged and what is not represented in the future making practices.

Confined by the computer screen, the social world tends to get closed in on itself (Whyte, 2013). This is particularly problematic when participants are making futures that have consequences for the real world, for example through corporate strategies that affect stakeholders and their environments or through building plans that change the natural landscape and the wellbeing of its future inhabitants. Here, the work of future making as inquiry may be especially challenging as participants lack the social interaction and sensorial experiences required to engage in reflective practice and rethink their basic assumptions. While this might happen also in offline environments, the tendency to suspend reflection, defer critical judgement and focus merely on ‘getting things done’ is more acute in online environments. Participants cannot, for instance, use their fingers, pens and gestures to fluidly evolve representations of the future, and may miss the subtle cues that arise from the social experience of being immersed in a given place and its atmosphere. While the coffee and window are close to hand for the manager in our opening vignette, the manager is remote from the team and the organizational futures that are being made. As this future making takes place online, through a small window in the place of inhabitation, it may lead to a more limited process of deliberation as participants engage with their offline as well as online practices. As we will articulate further below, this might lead to moral disengagement, and acts of domination from a distance that ultimately result in dystopic and unsustainable futures.

Dystopic and unsustainable futures

We argue that dystopic and unsustainable futures arise from future-making practices that become self-referential. This risk is particularly heightened in online future-making practices where participants lack reflection on widely held assumptions, the inclination to challenge the status quo, and more generally the ability to engage in inquiry. Dewey (1924) describes inquiry as hard work, undertaken when there is a need for accountability, i.e. when organizations need to offer reasons for why particular conclusions were drawn. He further describes the alternative as working through blind ‘hunches’, where decisions are made on the basis of conventional beliefs and asserted without a need to be justified.

In online environments of future making, participants are especially prone to relying on blind ‘hunches’, given the challenges posed by remoteness and the resulting reduction of embodied and sense-based experience. Where shared experiential knowledge is limited, reflective practices become less extended (or cut short) and participants are more likely to settle on simple heuristics. Here, futures can be made at a distance through acts of power, with blind ‘hunches’ being used to make decisions without however reflecting on wider environmental and societal consequences. For Latour (1986, p. 5), action at a distance involves using representations as fixed, ‘immutable mobiles’ that ‘help to muster, align, and win over new and unexpected allies, far away.’ ³ Such representations are then made in a prescriptive manner, being used by powerful voices with the aim to quash dissent and bring futures into being. Unjustified decisions, made through blind ‘hunches’, can in this way be asserted and imposed.

Offline future making might also result in domination at a distance – for example, when participants neglect the consequences that future making has for others who are distant in time and/or space. While we recognize this, our argument here is that the online environment, where bodily, emotional and sensorial experiences are mediated through the computer screen, is especially conducive to moral distancing or even disengagement from places, people and materials. Hence, we fear a heightened danger of domination at a distance when making futures online. Computers give a sense of omnipresence and control (Edwards, 1997), yet people ‘act less, compare less, socialize less, pause less, and consolidate less when they work at terminals than when they are away from them’ (Weick, 1985, p. 56). Remote managers and team members may feel in control with a world at their fingertips, while being separate and disengaged (often in unknown ways) from an understanding of others, their places and situations – even more so as they drift further away over time.

Here, we argue that the imposition of power from a distance may lead to futures that are less desirable; in that they are built upon partial or unquestioned representations, fail to address moral obligations towards societies and environments, and ultimately may lead to unanticipated and unwanted outcomes. While representations of the future enable action at a distance (by making imagined futures available in the present), remoteness can also bring with itself a moral disengagement. Moral distance was first theorized in relation to warfare, with remote decisions about the use of drones (Gusterson, 2016). Drones are controlled through video screens by pilots who are located at a great distance from war zones, for whom their targets’ lives are merely a representation. Such representations of human beings reduce constraints on the use of force (Williams, 2015). Life or death decisions occur through remote organizing as, for example, in a recent case of a man being sentenced to death through video conference in Singapore (Geddie, 2020). Action at a distance with insufficient knowledge of the consequences in lived experience is a form of violence (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2000), causing damage to others where futures are imposed onto them, rather than made for and with them or (in the case of future generations) with their consideration. The futures that result may be sustained by domination but have lasting negative effects, environmentally, socially and materially. For organizations that seek to make futures that matter rather than merely striving to dominate future making, remoteness is a particular challenge that needs attention and remedial action. This is especially the case in online future making (when participants make decisions that will have consequences for others who are remote in space and/or time). Take for example the team in the opening vignette, with participants appearing on each other’s screen and collectively seeking to bring into being a preferred future. As they lack shared experiential knowledge, they are vulnerable to closing down the inquiry by becoming morally disengaged and making deliberate shortcuts. Reviewing the graphs and analyses, they may not question these, or how they apply to the futures in the making beyond the computer. Acting on hunches, rather than deliberating and working through the consequences for others, beyond the organization’s stakeholders, and across future generations or groups not tied to the organization, they may not have sufficient feedback from the futures in the making, they may not adequately consider alternatives and they may be unable to reformulate the problems in ways that bring into view previously unconsidered aspects. In the following section, we argue that there are remedial actions that can be taken in online organizing to make it more reflexive, as offline futures are made online. We see these actions both enabling the sustained online involvement of heterogeneous remote participants in making preferred organizational futures and drawing attention outward to relevant places, people and materials offline.

Remedial Actions in Future Making Online

We argue that to make futures with consequences beyond the computer, remedial actions are needed to compensate for the relative lack of shared experiential knowledge available in future making online and to redress the risk of moral disengagement and relying on hunches. By conceptualizing future making as a form of inquiry proceeding through engagement with representations of the future, we identify three remedial actions for online future making that help well-disposed participants address this challenge associated with remoteness in online future making. If we reconsider the manager, sitting at home, interacting with their team through a video conference to make preferred futures, we argue that a key question they need to reflectively address is: ‘What or who is missing from our representations of the future?’ Framing future making as inquiry – a distributed and reflective process that proceeds through engagement with representations of the future – we identify three remedial actions that support participants in asking this question – i.e. to solicit feedback from the world outside the computer to invoke a conversation with it, to juxtapose alternatives to challenge underlying assumptions that may become overlooked online and to change medium to reveal indeterminacies and previously unconsidered features in the representation and the future it represents.

Solicit feedback

The first remedial action that we propose is to deliberately solicit feedback from the world outside the computer: the places, people and materials that are relevant to the futures under discussion online. Feedback from the world outside the computer is sought in order to invoke a ‘conversation’ with it (Schön, 1984) and thus to better understand possible, probable and preferred futures. Such feedback is intrinsic to the dialogical structure of inquiry but requires deliberate prompting online, where participants are remote from organizational places and one another (and may be literally and metaphorically elsewhere). With the lack of shared experiential knowledge, participants may otherwise miss sensorial cues that would challenge or inform the interpretations of place, people and materials.

The manager in the online meeting can ask questions that call participants into the online dialogue to bring their experience to bear on the future in development. Where possible the cluster of future-making practices, in which this online meeting is located, should also be extended to include one or more participants in relevant offline as well as online practices. To mitigate the challenge that experiential knowledge is not shared online, this remedial action enables online future making to benefit from individual participants’ experiential knowledge of and feedback from relevant places, people and materials in future making online, and helps to guard against their exclusion.

Where clusters of practices extend offline and online, the offline practices can support and augment online future making by raising questions and problematizing assumptions. Weick advocates ways to address the challenges of working at a computer terminal through walking around, engaging with others, taking computers into the field, in order to resolve: ‘some of the senseless episodes generated by the assumptions inherent in machine processing’ (Weick, 1985, p. 56). Individuals can be collocated with the sites of future operations and can bring their experience of these places and their possible futures into the online interaction. In the UK construction sector’s response to the pandemic, industry leaders, organizations and government met remotely (through the Construction Leadership Council) while some participants in these daily meetings regularly visited (and were responsible for) operating construction sites. In these sites, new ways of working were being implemented, with the evolving situation ‘on the ground’ being available in the online future making.

As participants in organizational future making online are called in and engaged to solicit feedback, there is an opportunity to situate and ground discussions of the future. Inquiry is best achieved through a distributed process, and as a remedial action, soliciting feedback seeks to draw on the diverse experiential knowledge of participants. Through such work, this remedial action can enable those involved in online future making to engage in evaluating collectively what is possible, interpreting verbal and visual analyses of probable futures, and negotiating their preferred futures. For instance, the manager sitting at home, remote from the office, can increase the degree to which preferred futures are made available to scrutiny in the present, by encouraging team members to mobilize their experiential knowledge in reflecting on what is included (and excluded), and thus by enabling them to reintegrate verbally or visually the missing places, people and materials.

We see soliciting feedback as crucially important to counter the tendency for the organization to close in on itself online. Bringing experiential knowledge that is relevant to the offline futures in the making into the online dialogue, through soliciting feedback, makes it possible to evaluate what is relevant. Otherwise, a false sense of control may arise online (Weick, 1985). Feedback can question assumptions and values in ways that are helpful to acting towards offline futures that are well adapted environmentally, socially and materially. Taking remedial action to enable rapid feedback allows participants to be able to take actions, to see the consequences of these and to feel actively engaged. Yet, this systematic work of soliciting feedback also needs to go beyond the participants involved in the online conversation: to ensure that internally coherent plans are not ill-adapted to reality requires external scrutiny. Remedial work to solicit feedback in online future making needs to invite alternative perspectives to open up possible futures to scrutiny, and also to identify where participants lack the necessary expertise. This can be done, for example, through formal external reviews by independent bodies, or by other managers from different business units of the organization. It requires participants to be sensitive to discrepant voices, to different understandings of worth, as well as to unexpected responses.

Such feedback is essential to ensuring that representations do not prematurely reify futures, or become seen as complete and unquestionable before they are evaluated. Yet soliciting feedback online requires careful attention as online participants may have relevant experiential knowledge but feel less able to articulate sensations verbally or to engage in informal side conversations that allow this experiential knowledge to be mobilized in reflexive questioning of organizational future-making practices and the futures under development. As organizational practices of making futures are increasingly online, such work at a distance requires both emotional and practical orientation, with participants ‘oriented empathetically towards both the other person and agentically towards the joint situation’ (Hafermalz & Riemer, 2020, p. 1627). Without this remedial action of soliciting feedback, inquiry may close prematurely and the online conversation may fail to generate or capture varied experiences of the places of future operations, regard for future generations, residents, other social groups, and the materialization of the future over time.

Juxtapose alternatives

The second remedial action that we suggest is to juxtapose alternatives: to compare and contrast representations of alternative futures to help bring into view what is at stake in futures in the making and to enable reflection on preferred futures. As the online team involved in future making reviews graphs and analyses, there is the danger that team members do not question assumptions in the modelling or that they remain silent, taking each representation of the future as ‘given’ rather than considering different options. This idea of pursuing various ‘lines of possible action’ to find out what they are really like (Dewey, 1922) is intrinsic to future making as inquiry. Deliberately invoking such thought experimentation through juxtaposing alternatives is important online to make the differing performativity and consequences of alternative futures apparent, to increase sensitivity to the limitations and incompleteness of knowledge and to raise questions about what is not represented in the shared practice online. While comparison and contrast are central to existing techniques such as scenario planning, we see this juxtaposition of alternatives as particularly important online, as participants tend to look at one representation on the screen, and to see it as fixed. Juxtaposing alternatives forces people to make active decisions about ‘this’ or ‘that’ and is thus a way to sustain their active engagement in inquiry. By comparing and contrasting different options, the remote manager might help the team overcome a lack of shared experiential knowledge to imaginatively work across an interrelated set of concerns, spanning from how to respond to grand challenges, to how to address risks and opportunities and how to organize in the face of unpredictable demands. Taking a future travel strategy for members of an organization as an example, the remedial action of juxtaposing alternatives, for instance with different mixes and modes of public and private transportation, may alter the conversation from one of agreement and dissent, to a richer dialogue that brings out questions of values, sustainability, personal safety, organizational risks and potential volumes.

Generating and juxtaposing alternatives in online future making is important because the identification, naming and labelling of things are essentially also political acts: revealing possible constructions of the future or world views that conceptualize experience (Lê, 2013). Participants may find it difficult to articulate their experiential knowledge in terms that allow them to bring it into and show its relevance to the online future-making process. When confronted with graphs and analyses shared through the screen, it may be hard for participants to draw on their experience from outside the computer to alter the set of concerns under discussion. Where ambiguities are too quickly resolved through a label (Weick, 2009), this can close down and exclude such avenues of inquiry that draw on lived experience. Online, where shared experiential knowledge is limited, the juxtaposition and comparison of alternatives provides a remedial action that highlights different options to address an equivocal situation, enabling participants’ articulation of values and testing of their grounds drawing on their own lived experience. By forcing participants to generate and consider alternatives, this remedial action provides a starting point to ask the question of what or who is missing from the representation. While juxtaposing alternatives is part of inquiry, we suggest that it is deliberately invoked in online future making as a remedial action to counter the difficulty of a lack of shared experiential knowledge, and to enable participants to draw on their own experiential knowledge when remote from each other in online environments, and from the futures that are under development. In the absence of such a remedial action, futures represented online may become seen as fixed and immutable, without their wider implications being fully appreciated or considered.

While soliciting feedback seeks to be sensitive to experiential knowledge about places, people and materials associated with futures in the making, juxtaposing alternatives enables online participants involved in making futures to more deeply understand the consequential difference between proposed futures and to evaluate which are preferred futures. By learning from and choosing among diverse options, participants in online practices of future making may be able to revisit assumptions or negotiate and arrive at new framings. Through this work of juxtaposing alternatives, participants can furthermore coordinate diverse values and understandings without needing to agree (Ferraro et al., 2015) as they work online to develop futures that have physical consequences (e.g. new offices, organizational strategies and products, rather than new software or gaming strategies), and thus have to conjure and represent the significant stakeholders of the futures envisaged.

Change medium

The third remedial action is to change medium in order to sustain inquiry – iterating across forms of representation in different media, for example from online documents to paper copies, or across software formats and packages, to draw attention toward previously unconsidered features of the futures in the making. This counters the tendency online to close down the inquiry too early by re-presenting the problems in ways that bring into view previously unconsidered aspects. Changing medium draws attention to the incompleteness of representations, which―from a pragmatist standpoint―should be treated as generative (Garud, Jain, & Tuertscher, 2008; Knorr Cetina, 2001). Where representations are open to be rapidly altered, they invite exploration, prompt questions and maintain interaction – yet this is more challenging online, where representations are often presented and treated as complete, rather than in development. In future making, realizing futures through distributed forms of inquiry requires a variety of forms of prototyping (Ferraro et al., 2015; Whyte, 2013) to test aspects of the proposed futures before a full (and potentially more costly) realization. In online future making with consequences beyond the computer, we propose that the remedial action of changing medium can counter the tendency to see online representations as complete and can reveal new areas for inquiry.

To compensate for the lack of shared experiential knowledge, this remedial action thus brings deliberate attention to a set of activities that remote individuals can bring to the shared online future-making practice, by using different forms of representation in their shared practice online, and by alternating across online and offline media in their own practice to better understand preferred futures. The remote manager might enrich the interaction with online graphs and analyses by printing them out to see them anew, through the physicality of sitting in front of them with a coffee at the dining table. They might digitize their annotations and offline notes to bring them into the conversation. To enable active thinking and questioning of what is represented, online work is often scaffolded by offline media, by taking notes in a physical notepad. There are also an emerging set of shared interactive software that allow rapid transitions across different forms of online representation, media and modes, for example through initially using and clustering ‘post-it’ notes online, through enabling intuitive forms of mark-up, or through switching modes (e.g. text chat, voice, visual), comparing and contrasting track changes in online documents, as well as sharing screens, moving texts and pictures between packages, and resorting to an online whiteboard to jointly develop ideas. Any such transition, that requires participants in future making to look again, reveals the provisional nature and incompleteness of representations and thus makes it possible to revisit and re-evaluate aspects of the future in the making.

In an indeterminate situation, changing medium is an important way of testing assumptions (Yaneva, 2005, p. 871) to ensure that ‘fantasy documents’ (Clarke, 1999) and plans that ignore important aspects of futures are identified and revisited. Switching the medium of communication provides a constructive disruption or shift (Lanzara, 2016) that enables what is represented to be observed anew and questioned. As no representation can ever fully capture an unknown future in its entirety, these transitions make areas of indeterminacy about the future visible, in turn facilitating more reflective practices of inquiry. When inquiry and deliberations close too early, the likelihood of an ill-adapted plan or strategy increases, whereas organizations would be better served by active experimentation and learning through multiple representations and across media. The act of changing medium enables preferred futures to be questioned and not assumed. This remedial action is thus supportive of an iterative process of inquiry that seek creative ways of engaging with future places, people and materials – including both the natural environment in which organizational activity is situated as well as the specific material arrangements of the organizational spaces and places that are the sites of future operations.

Concluding Remarks

In this essay we draw on the pragmatist tradition to theorize processes of online future making, to articulate its dynamics and the challenges that arise, and to suggest remedial actions. The term future making draws attention to 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. 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 compensate for the lack of shared experiential knowledge – the emerging feelings and embodied experiences that can be hard to articulate but are known through the senses – to both sustain the involvement of heterogeneous remote participants in making preferred organizational futures online and to bring relevant places, people and materials into the futures that are made and considered. They redress the risks of moral disengagement and relying on hunches in online future making. While soliciting feedback invokes the conversation with places, people and materials beyond the computer; juxtaposing alternatives draws attention to the consequential difference between proposed futures and helps to evaluate which are preferred futures; and changing medium in turn provides a constructive disruption that enables what is represented to be observed anew and questioned. Such remedial actions are needed to address the challenges of remoteness in online future making, the potential for participants to miss sensorial cues that would challenge or inform the interpretations of place, people and materials, or for dialogue to become inward - looking online, to assume completeness and not hold futures open to question. In online future making – with bodies, emotions and sociality being mediated through the computer – it is more difficult to get a feeling for sites, places and materials; to hear critical or dissenting voices from stakeholders; and to engage in back and side talks that might enhance understandings or challenge assumptions.

We see such remedial actions to compensate for the lack of shared experiential knowledge as particularly important in the quest to address ‘grand challenges’ and offer resilient organizational responses to the futures that societies now face, such as the concerns about climate change, loss of biodiversity, pandemics and fires. Future making is always difficult, especially so as we face these challenging and potentially dystopic futures. While ‘grand challenges’ have prompted sociological interest in futures (e.g. Granjou, Walker, & Salazar, 2017; Hall, 2016), our contribution is to consider the particular difficulties associated with keeping in view the relevant places, people and materials, and to suggest remedial actions to address remoteness in online future making, where there is a lack of shared experiential knowledge. Unlike many forms of online interaction, in which organizational outcomes may be wholly online (e.g. software development), such online future making has far-reaching societal consequences across remote places and times. It requires participation and access to forms of experiential knowledge (embodied and sense-based) that may be immediately lacking and not shared online.

Thus, there are implications for organization and management scholars, providing theoretical grounding for further research on organizational future making, on addressing ‘grand challenges’ and on organizing online. While the term ‘future making’ has become broadly used to indicate all the practices in organizations through which futures are made (Wenzel, in press; Wenzel et al., 2020), this essay further specifies the constitution of such practices, extending previous work (Comi & Whyte, 2018) to make a claim about the kind of practices useful in orienting to an uncertain future – i.e. those structured as inquiry. There is a need for organization scholars to build on this work and the remedial actions we can proffer through renewed empirical attention to helping organizations develop futures that are well grounded socially, materially and environmentally. We argue that future making as inquiry provides a rich grounding for such research, particularly as such future-making practices are increasingly online, as it draws attention to how participants practically engage with representations, and the reflection, questioning, creativity, curiosity and focus that this can provoke. It raises the key question: ‘What or who is missing from our representations of the future?’ Representations are in fact underplayed in other non-rationalistic perspectives on the future, including those on foreseeing and wayfinding, which treat them as mental constructs (cognitive, fixed, and determining action). In our framing of future making as inquiry, representations are in the world and seen as having a potentially generative role, being understood as incomplete and malleable as part of an ongoing inquiry.

Here, by drawing on the pragmatist tradition to frame future making as inquiry we argue that making preferred futures is best achieved through an inclusive and deliberative process that enables critical thinking and the questioning of long-held assumptions and values. Though it can be challenging for organizations with fixed routines, a renewed attention to future making is important as organizations can open their future to question and not be bound by their history. While this might be uncomfortable for their members, organizations can listen, consult, and make significant changes on issues fundamental to their identity. ⁴ To address challenges such as inequality, climate change, racism and gender discrimination (Harley & Fleming, 2021), there is a need for future scholarship to develop new methods and approaches to empirically study the practices of online future making. The remedial actions that we set out are a potential starting point for such empirical study, as is the notion of inquiry, which could be used to consider how diverse participants can develop futures encompassing different forms of value without agreeing. Such work might extend an emerging and timely body of work on grand challenges (Ferraro et al., 2015) and the moral choices that are faced by organizations through greater understanding of the processes of future making and the moves through which organizations can achieve preferred futures.

Although there are well-established traditions of work on organizational practice, and on social interactions within online practice, there is relatively little work that addresses the interconnections between online organizing and future making. As organizing today is increasingly online, there is an urgent need for further research into how individuals and teams in organizations engage experientially with, and make decisions within, online work. Such research might include research on their emotional and embodied responses to decisions mediated by assumptions embedded in artificial intelligence, analysis of big data and globally remote virtual actor networks. Our essay articulates how online work can be structured using remedial actions to mitigate the risk of remoteness in online future making. There is a need for explicit attention to these remedial actions that compensate for the lack of sense-based and embodied interaction to create participatory practices, and without them it is more difficult to open up and question fundamental assumptions or to push conversation in directions that may challenge organizational members’ values and sense of identity. Further research might explore empirically how future making unfolds within and across online and offline practices, creating situations in which decisions are made in non-participatory and participatory ways. By understanding these patterns of practices and outcomes, we might work to avoid dystopic futures, and create situations that better enable the making of preferred futures.