The Future We Fear: How Undesirable Futures Drive Anticipatory Adaptation in Digital Sustainability

Abstract

Organizations are increasingly adopting digital technologies to advance their sustainability goals. Yet, the asynchronous pace of digitalization and sustainability transitions creates a critical risk: lock-ins that limit adaptability, entrench narrow optimization logics, and generate unintended, undesirable environmental and social consequences. Existing research offers little insight into how organizations can address these new forms of rigidity or unintended consequences in the present, before they become irreversible in the future. Building on the literature of future-making, we examine this phenomenon in a three-year action research study of a Dutch social housing association that utilizes predictive digital twin technology to achieve carbon neutrality. We observed how managers and stakeholders engaged in an iterative three-practice process that we refer to as anticipatory adaptation. Anticipatory adaptation evolved from (a) extending temporal attention beyond the project lifecycle, to (b) redistributing communicative agency across organizational and community levels, and then (c) integrating user concerns into experimental design adjustments. We identified three mechanisms—attuning to emerging concerns, recasting futures, and redistributing agency—which combined in different ways throughout the process to enable anticipatory adaptation. Our data challenges the boundaries of ‘desirable’ future imaginaries, suggesting that undesirable, even dystopian, futures serve as potent catalysts for organizational responsiveness in contexts in which organizations interact with marginalized communities. We offer a conceptual model for how organizations can balance desirable and undesirable futures when using digital tools for sustainability.