The futurity of decisions as a facilitator of organizational creativity and change

Behavior in organizations is predominantly driven by expectations and routines derived from past experience rather than by envisioned scenarios reflecting future potentialities. The disproportionate weight placed on expectations derived from past experience has been blamed for a variety of problems associated with individual and organizational creativity and change. Drucker addressed this long‐standing problem by arguing that decision makers must address the degree of “futurity” they need to factor into their present thinking and action. Specifically, decision makers must consider the relative weight or ratio given to ideas derived from two temporally distinct sources of knowledge – expectations constructed from remembering past experiences, and visions derived from imagining the future. In this paper I seek to describe how varying the priority given to remembering and imagining during enactment (action‐perception‐sensemaking) episodes affects organizational creativity and change.