Future-making in the front-end of projects

• Enriches project front-end scholarship with insights on future-making. • Acknowledges both demands for commitment and provisional understanding of futures. • Proposes five strategies for the project front-end that mobilize insights on future-making as inquiry. • Strategies address timing, sequencing, abandonment, flexibility, and inclusion. • Establishes research agenda to enable more inquiry-led planning in projects. Future-making scholarship frames the future as something iteratively constructed through practices of interpretation and negotiation. The project front-end literature, by contrast, is dominated by rationalist assumptions treating planning as a vehicle to enable ‘lock-in’ to preferred outcomes early in a project. To bring these literatures into dialogue, we theorize the project front-end as a space in which provisional representations of the future intersect with institutional demands for early commitments. Drawing on practice-based perspectives and pragmatist inquiry, we propose five strategies to mobilize insights on future-making as inquiry in the project front-end: (1) strategic timing, (2) staged sequencing, (3) potential abandonment, (4) design flexibility, and (5) participatory inclusion. We conclude this essay by outlining a research agenda to enable more inquiry-led planning in projects.