Organizations must prepare for many futures, as is illustrated by the common use of multiple scenarios in the forecasting area – yet expectations regarding the future are often quite wrong (Taleb, 2007), and they may miss fundamental shifts
that dramatically change the nature of an organization’s future. Stapp (2009) calls these shifts “quantum collapses,” to reflect the fact that the wave of future possibilities has been reduced to a single instance (that is, the present) and that other possibilities for the present, which once existed, have been annihilated.
Thus change in future states sometimes reflects a normal gradual development, but occasionally organizations are confronted with radically different envi- ronments, which reflect quantum collapses that fundamentally change reality.
Consequently, the path to the future is much more than a linear evolution along an anticipated scenario; it might better be characterized as a number of quantum jumps among disconnected threads leading to the future, many of which are unknown when viewed from the present.
This juxtaposition of linear and radical change, which may be associated with jumps among disconnected threads into the future, is not new to the leader- ship field. For example, Tushman and Romanelli (1985) distinguished between convergent and reorientation phases in organizational evolution, and they noted that convergent periods require mainly symbolic leadership that supports cur- rent conceptualizations, whereas reorientations require both symbolic activity and substantive activities that initiate and implement changes.
There is substantial merit in that perspective, but, as we noted already, many dramatic changes in dynamic systems may occur without much guidance from leaders, despite the attention that leadership vision has gained in the past few decades. Van Knippenburg and Stam (2014) confront this issue, noting that we know surprisingly little about visionary leadership and the processes by which leaders motivate others to contribute to their vision. Their arguments are extended by recognizing that vision involves followers, as well as leaders (Stam, van Knippenberg, & Wisse, 2010). Both followers and leaders are part of a multilevel dynamic system in which individual and collective identifications are enacted as the visions are pursued (Stam et al., 2014). Occasionally, this bottom- up enactment of a vision can create new identities for organizational members and outcomes that were not envisioned by leaders. In other words, a leader’s vision may primarily be a catalyst that changes both people and organizations – sometimes dramatically. Nevertheless, I argue that there is much more beneath the surface of such change, and that we need to revise our notions of time and future potentials to more fully understand the process and the role of leadership.
In an article drawing on concepts from quantum theory, Jessica Dinh, Ernest Hoffman, and I suggested that we miss an important aspect of organizational events if we think of time only as flowing from the present into the future (Lord et al., 2015). We argued that, to develop a fuller understanding, it was necessary to “reverse the arrow of time” and to think of potentials as flowing from the future back to the present. Furthermore, it is helpful to represent this process as a prob- ability wave in which many potentials are present in the more distant future, but in which, as it flows towards the present, potentials are winnowed by constraints, until one of the many potentials that had previously existed is translated into the
present we experience. The advantage of this perspective is that it recognizes that there were many alternative “presents” that were possible at one time and which were perhaps as likely as the present that actually materialized, but which are now gone and perhaps were never even consciously considered.
To see how this process can operate, consider the case of Amy, a his- tory major from Glasgow, Scotland, who is currently a tour guide in Berlin.
Although this potential was always there in Amy’s distant future, Amy discov- ered it only after a friend convinced her to move to Berlin, where she met and married a tour guide, who then convinced Amy that she could do this job as well. In short, constraints associated with friends, location, and partners changed, allowing Amy to explore an alternative career that she had never previously considered, but which she now absolutely loves. And, while this was happening, the alternatives that Amy had considered, such as moving to London, became very unlikely. The many potentials that such a move might have offered were winnowed out and remain largely unknown to Amy.
In short, the present we experience is somewhat arbitrary, reflecting hap- penstance and enactment, as well as vision, and often it is radically different than what we or our leaders had anticipated it to be. Moreover, this present can be defined at multiple levels, from an organization’s profitability, to a group’s affective state, to an individual’s situated identity, to the activation of a particular thought or feeling. Leadership processes can have influence on the presents that are created at all of these levels, albeit within different time frames.
The critical point in this line of reasoning is that these multiple potentialities exist in the future simultaneously, but in an indefinite or unformed state, until they become entangled with a sufficient number of constraints to create the present that we experience. In other words, the present emerges from the set of many potentials, while other potentials are simultaneously obliterated, and this is a continual process, although we experience only its outcome. For example, there once were many potential versions of this chapter (and this book) that could have been written, but were not. This view of time suggests that the emergence of a radically new and previously unexpected present is not so sur- prising, because the present emerges from future potentials, rather than evolves from the past. But the constraints that winnow potential futures do evolve from the past to the future; hence the present is the juncture of a two-way flow across time: Constraints move in a present-to-future direction and potentials, in a future-to-present direction. In this way, the medium in which we breathe and act – the present – unites both the past and the future.
Lord and colleagues (2015) theorize that linear change occurs when past constraints are maintained, and nonlinear change occurs when new patterns of constraints occur and become entangled with potentials flowing from the future.
For example, limits on human information processing (a constraint) were radi- cally changed by the invention of computers, and this change became scalable with the invention of microprocessors, laptops, and smartphones. Changes in
these constraints then allowed many very different potentials to be created by human activity, and the world we experience is far different than it would have been had these information-processing constraints not changed. At an organiza- tional level, changes in CEOs often change many constraints, which allows new potentials to be discovered, such as new organizational strategies, although effects on organizational performance are not always positive (Schepker, Kim, Patel, Thatcher, & Campion, 2017). At the individual level, changes in constraints deriving from occupations, locations, or social relations often allow new pos- sibilities to occur, although our argument is that these possibilities had previously existed in a partially formed manner.
Many people now suggest that an even more profound change will occur when the constraint created by limited human intelligence is exceeded by artifi- cial intelligences – but, from the perspective of the present, one cannot predict exactly how such change will affect society. One may understand the potential evolution of the new constraint associated with artificial intelligence rather than more limited human intelligence, but its effect on the present reflects a quantum collapse caused by the entanglement of many system properties that cannot be understood until the quantum collapse occurs. Consequently, making sense of this change may be possible only in retrospect. As Steve Jobs is reputed to have said, one can connect the dots only looking backwards. This is because the medium of time often hides the emerging future. Nevertheless, people spend considerable time and effort considering the future, and they act in ways that attempt to control the future – an issue addressed in the next section.