Understanding the Future for Strategy Formulation

Abstract

The purpose of this chapter is to explain our perception of time by using metaphorical thinking and to show how we understand the concept of future within the framework of time, complexity and uncertainty. Strategies are built for future actions and understanding the nature and the content of future becomes important. Human mind developed, during its historical existence, a series of metaphors able to suggest new semantic dimensions of time and its role in structuring the future. Among all these metaphors those based on space are essential since time and space have been integrated by scientists in a complex n-dimensional space concept. Time specialization became, thus, the main cognitive pattern in dealing with time and the future. Due to the complexity of future it is important to explain the way we correlate variables describing events and phenomena, which means to address the linearity and nonlinearity paradigms. The chapter ends up by presenting the semantic dynamics of uncertainty and its role in defining probable futures, where we define corporate strategic objectives and design strategies able to achieve them.