Prospective sensemaking and narratives: the role of collective mental time travel (MTT) in the prospective sensemaking narratives of a radically uncertain future

Future can be punctuated with various forms of uncertainties. Some recent studies have conceptualised it as the radical uncertainty, which is characterised by the events that can’t be allotted meaningful probabilities. Despite the perennial need to fathom and manage uncertainty, a comprehensive framework illustrating how the sense of radical uncertainty is made especially when the rationality-based probability models are only able to provide a very limited outlook of the future is missing. Harkening to these pressing concerns in the extant literature, this conceptual paper aims to depict the process of sensemaking of the uncertainty. Furthermore, the dimension of the prospective sensemaking is under researched in the literature of sensemaking. Therefore, the emphasis of this paper is to shed light on the prospective sensemaking of uncertainty by showing its linkages with the underexplored dimension of temporality (by discussing the novel concept of the collective mental time travel) and the narratives. This paper proposes a new comprehensive framework that shows that people make sense of a radically uncertain future with narratives and collective mental time travel is used to construct them.