This paper submits that there are two key tasks in shaping the future to a firm’s advantage—imagining a preferred version of the future and persuading stakeholders of this imagined future by deeming it plausible in a way that it becomes imaginatively accessible to them. While extant research offers multiple perspectives on how strategists can render their imagined futures more plausible in the eyes of stakeholders, they collectively emphasize how imagined futures are constructed and assessed, rather than how imagined futures are related to the present reality. What is less explored is how firms might render the future more plausible by orienting it toward the current reality. This would involve harnessing assessments of ‘what is’ as a foundation of ‘what is to be’. This paper draws from the literature on counterfactual imagination to articulate how assessments of modifications of present reality—which involve structured imagination—can enhance the plausibility of imagined futures.
