Putting Distant Futures into Action: How Actors Sustain a Course of Action toward Distant-Future Goals through Path Enactment

One of the most significant challenges of pursuing distant-future goals is sustaining a course of action toward a future with solutions that do not yet exist. We address this challenge in a real-time study of a sustainability workstream’s collective activities to develop a sustainability strategy toward a net-zero carbon future. We observed how the participants in the core team engaged in an iterative three-phase process that we call path enactment. Path enactment evolved from (a) imagining how solutions could connect into paths to (b) integrating emerging paths into configurations, and then (c) stretching these new path configurations toward the company’s distant-future goals. We identified three mechanisms, bracketing, narrating, and calculating, which combined in different ways throughout the phases to enable path enactment. Based on our findings, we develop a process model to explain how these paths become increasingly stretched toward distant-future goals and embedded as a sustained course of action in a sustainability strategy. Our research significantly extends theories of organizational future making by combining imagination and realizability in our model, enriching our understanding of how organizations may put distant-future goals into action.