Future Making? 

I approached the recent “turn to future making” (Wenzel et al., 2025) with great interest and eager anticipation, as I have a long-held interest both as an educator and researcher. And yet, upon reading the articles that have stimulated the turn I became increasingly frustrated with how the research move positioned itself; how effortlessly it dismissed previous research that had taken ‘the future’ seriously, and the ease with which practitioners were labelled as uninterested in the future. While I remain on board with the need for management and organization studies (MOS) to better understand and account for how the future affects managing and organizing in the present, my concern is that how future making is described and how scholars are advised to study it in the works of Wenzel et al. (2025) and Comi et al. (2025) will not lead to the bright future (Wickert, 2025) the topic deserves. My main criticisms are threefold. First, having disregarded existing research programs, future making advocates believe there is little to learn from scholarship that has addressed and continues to focus on very similar questions. Second, the future making initiative has progressed ignoring a key tenet, that the future is irredeemably uncertain, meaning that utopian visions, for example, have little or no purchase. And third, the emancipatory approach to future making (Comi et al., 2025), much like the grand challenges literature, oversimplifies complex questions. 

“Old wine in new bottles” 

Future making theorizing has ignored or mispresented scenario planning and has assigned it a marginal role, simply grouping it with other forecasting techniques. Such a mischaracterization is a useful tactic for researchers to claim their idea of future making is different from scenario planning. However, there are far more similarities than future making authors care to admit. For example, Wenzel et al. (2025) identify a distinguishing feature of future making is that actors are only now beginning to recognize that the future is no longer predictable or controllable. But scenario planning was developed by practitioners at least five decades ago to address the very unpredictability of the future; helping managers to cope with an uncertain future was the primary motive for the approach. Comi et al. (2025) identify their emancipatory approach as different from scenario planning through its emphasis on craft and craftwork, which they see as essential for pursuing a desirable future. Again, scenario planning writers frequently refer to what they do as craft, rather than science or art (Eidinow and Ramírez, 2016). Only, for them, the future is too uncertain for a single hoped-for future to be pursued; scenario planning holds that managers are best helped to handle uncertainty by considering multiple plausible futures when making their strategic decisions. 

The future is uncertain 

While neglect of the scenario planning literature leads future making theorists to advance dubious claims for the distinctiveness for their work, a failure to engage in a much older stream of literature means they fail to appreciate the future in all its complexity. In the economic realm, Frank Knight realized over 100 years ago that uncertainty is an inherent and dominant force that is both affective and affecting and cautioned against ignoring it. Knight (2009 [1921], p. 124) emphasized that the uncertainty of future course of events required people to ‘act “intelligently” … to secure adaptation, which means foresight’. Acting intelligently, according to Knight (2009 [1921]), called for actors to form opinions and exercise judgment, as these capacities are necessary when dealing with the unknown and uncertain. Despite their claims, much of the future making and utopian futures literatures are built on the assumption that the future is controllable, rational, and certain (Comi et al., 2025; see also Gümüsay and Reinecke, 2022). If not, the notion of a realisable desired future makes little sense.  

Hope for the future? There’s More to it Than That  

Alongside scenario planning and Knightian economics, another literature that future making scholars seem unaware of is the anthropology of the future research move (Bryant and Knight, 2019; Valentine and Hassoun, 2019). While the emancipatory approach advocated by Comi et al. (2025) seems solely based on the hope of a better future for all; a hope I may share, but I also recognize that hope, even when materialized as an attractive vision of the future, has little chance of being realized if the uncertainty and complexity that surrounds it is swept under the carpet. Hope is a future action orientation, but it is not the only one. There are many others that can come into play during work that is future-focused, such as: anticipation, expectation, speculation, potentiality, and destiny (Bryant and Knight, 2019). If we restrict our inquiries to the times when actors hope for a specific future, our 

notion of future making will be overly limited. Rather, we should adopt Bryant and Knight’s (2019) stance that research into how futures matter to presents, needs to focus on how future action orientations make a difference to how actors in the present cope with complexity and uncertainty. Practitioners may hope for a desirable future to emerge, but they will also anticipate, expect, speculate, potentialize and feel they are driven by destiny. To gain deeper knowledge and understanding of how the future matters, we cannot study hope alone. 

A Bright Future for Future Making? 

Imre Lakatos (1970) identified that for research programs to be considered generative they must advance theoretical understanding and knowledge of practice; if they fail in either of these pursuits, they should be regarded as degenerative as they contribute little or nothing. For future making research to have a bright future it must be a generative research program. The publication frenzy that characterizes the dash to the future in all its forms: future making, utopian futures, alternative futures, etc., is no guarantee of quality. Indeed, it suggests that the temptation of publication success is overriding the pursuit of theorizing and of crafting (that word again!) insights into how practitioners cope with uncertain futures. The grand challenges research program is receiving increasing criticism that questions whether it is anything more than the latest research fad that is yet to make any significant theoretical or practical contribution (see Berkowitz et al., 2024; Carton et al., 2024; Gariel and Bartel-Radic, 2024; Seelos et al., 2023). To avoid the same fate, future making advocates must prioritize generative theorizing over publication quantity. Literatures, hitherto ignored or mischaracterized, need to be re-engaged with, critically and genuinely, so that readers are clear just how future making is distinct from older research traditions both within MOS and in related fields. Rather than disregard how practitioners cope with uncertain futures, researchers would be better advised to investigate how they manage in complex environments. Future making theorists would benefit from greater levels of reflexivity about how their own preferences and values impact how they frame and conduct their research. And finally, I call for more humility from colleagues so that we resist the temptation to over-claim for our research and prioritize theoretical enhancement over self-promotion (Hannah, 2025).