Entrepreneurs use language to craft the future and convince stakeholders to legitimate such futures. Devising language that can give form to futures and simultaneously legitimizes such futures is particularly challenging given the temporal disconnect between a distant, imagined future and the immediate present. To shed light on how organizations can employ language to overcome the present-future divide, we draw on the revelatory case of the Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), a world-renowned architecture firm that communicates extensively about their architectural projects, documenting them from conceptualization to realization. Our findings reveal a process model with three phases that are supported by three rhetorical stratagems BIG uses to make the future amenable to stakeholders in the present, creating agency and structure in future worlds, and thereby gaining legitimacy. Our study holds implications for the literature on rhetorical institutionalism, future-making in entrepreneurship, and organizational craft, as well as for managers and entrepreneurs.
