Despite the uncertainty and unknowability of the future, there is growing recognition that the way we think about and imagine the future, and our expectations as to what will happen in the future, guides and directs actions today.

We evoke “the future” in many ways: future of work, future-proofing, future generations, facing the future, saving the future, and so on. However, anthropologist and futurist (and fellow Australian) Genevieve Bell makes the point that, among all this evocation, we often fail to consider important questions such as: Who gets to talk about the future? Who gets to predict its path? And who gets to advocate for a particular unfolding of the future?1 In short, who does future-making as a practice, and how do they do it? These questions are important to answer given how powerful imagined futures are in driving economic activity and social impact.

Within organization and management theory, future-making has been defined as “the work of making sense of possible and probable futures, and evaluating, negotiating, and giving form to preferred ones.” 2 Future-making gauges and guides diverse organizational relations and processes, including strategy and entrepreneurship.3 In this way, it is a cornerstone for understanding the temporal dynamics of different types of organizations, in addition to economic activity, and is a growing line of scholarly inquiry.

There are several things that individuals and organizations can do to improve how we deploy future-making for social innovation and social impact.

  • Create alternative imagined futures. Recent studies suggest that a way to start the future-making process is to examine sites of hyper-projectivity, such as community and policy forums, public debates, sources of hype (for example, around new ideas or technologies), and science fiction.
  • Legitimize an imagined future. We need to be aware that some imagined futures are accepted as more credible than others and so, at an organizational or policy level, it is important to consider which stakeholders are involved in the future-making process and how this may assist in developing legitimacy.
  • Take action toward an alternative imagined future. For organizations and policy makers, it’s important to reflect backwards from an imagined future and identify desirable pathways to get to this imagined future.

Read the full article about the future of social impact by Danielle Logue at Stanford Social Innovation Review.