The present study contributes to the discussion on planning in organizations as a future-oriented and temporally paradoxical practice. By drawing on the literature on future-making, it addresses planning as a complex practice in which past and future are being enacted and reproduced in present. Paradoxicality emerges when future needs to be simultaneously envisioned as closed and be kept open allowing for unexpected and unintended outcomes be built in over the course of planning. Through a case study on a decade of an on-going design and construction process of a “future hospital”, we examine the way actors aim to influence the experience of future as a temporal category as part of the activities in the present. In the case, future is deliberately kept under construction during the whole project time, searching for alternative trajectories and, thus, placing the future as something that is constantly in the making. The organizational actors manage the temporal paradoxes by drawing on temporal strategies of slowing down, pausing, and accelerating through which they aim to make sense and adjust the course of the planning. These strategies produce the temporal dynamics of the project: oscillation, temporal expansion, stagnation, and temporal integration through which the paradox is managed at the project level.
