Playing With Boundaries: Designing Future-Oriented Narratives for Strategic Renewal

Narratives can be pivotal in strategy development, especially in change and transformation. In the emerging body of literature in this area, however, little attention has been paid to how one uses future-oriented narratives deliberately in strategic renewal processes. This conceptual paper, therefore, explores how organizations can use a narrative approach to imagine alternative futures while simultaneously creating discretion for action in the present. We develop a narrative approach from several propositions about playing with contextual, social, and temporal boundaries. The proposed framework contributes to the literature in three ways. For one, it extends work on strategic renewal by theorizing how future-oriented narratives can support strategic renewal. Second, we contribute to research on temporal work by exploring how one constructs distant future narratives and uses the past as a resource for imagination. Finally, this paper contributes to the literature on boundary work by using ’boundary’ as a core construct for theorizing about how playing with boundaries can enhance efforts to reinterpret path-dependent views.