Projectivity

How do organizations think about the future? Remarkably, this question has received little explicit attention in complex project organizing research, yet projects are fundamentally about achieving desired future states. We first identify the micro-foundations of project shaping as the cognitive process of future-perfect-thinking and the dialogic process of projecting. We then show how project narratives link these micro-foundations to the socio-economic process of projecting which thereby achieves this desired future perfect state. Finally, we discuss how these processes have led to the growing projectification of organizations and the economy, and how important they are in meeting the grand challenges that our societies presently face such as achieving net zero.