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

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.