Making Actionable Futures in the Face of Wicked Problems: The Role of Metaphors in Envisioning an Organizational Strategy for Poverty Alleviation

19.05.2022 12:00 – 13:00

MANAGEMENT BROWN BAG SEMINAR / SHORT ABSTRACT

How do actors construct an actionable understanding of organizational futures in the context of wicked problems? Extant literature views future making either as a retrospective construction, treating the future as if it had already happened, or as a distant as-if imaginary, treating the future as a fictitious construction. However, wicked problems challenge these accounts, as they require actors to deal with complex and constantly shifting realities. To understand this challenge, we studied how members of Fe y Alegria, a Latin American faith-based organization seeking to combat poverty through education in extreme contexts, were challenged to re-construct their future during a strategic review process. Our findings reveal the role of temporal boundary objects, in our case metaphors, in the collective construction of an actionable future despite facing radical uncertainty and shifting manifestations of poverty in extreme contexts. Metaphors allowed organizational members to collectively move from a retrospective view of the future, to what we term a “future continuous” perspective -- an open-ended and continuously recalibrated account of their organizational future. We develop a process model that advance understandings of temporality and future making in tackling wicked problems.

Lieu

Bâtiment: Uni Mail

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Boulevard du Pont-d'Arve 40
1205 Geneva

Room M 3383, 3rd floor

Organisé par

Faculté d'économie et de management
Institute of Management

Intervenant-e-s

Juliane REINECKE, King’s College London, UK

entrée libre

Classement

Catégorie: Séminaire

Plus d'infos

www.unige.ch/gsem/en/research/seminars/iom/

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