Dominant Deceptions: How Future-Oriented Narratives Transform into Deception

Drawing on a multi-year, qualitative study of a promising venture in a nascent industry, we develop a process model tracing how future-oriented narratives can transform into deception. In the venture we studied, the founder’s future-oriented narratives were initially viewed as evidence of his visionary foresight. As these narratives traveled downward through the organization, employees responsible for operations translated the founder’s broad vision into specific targets and metrics. Some details described an attainable future; others reached so far beyond the attainable that they became liminal, occupying a grey zone between right and wrong. Over time, growing internal and external demands for tangible progress created an expectations-reality gap, prompting employees to engage in temporal reorientation, shifting statements from “we will” to “we have.” Their statements crossed from liminal to deceptive, now asserting as fact something that did not exist. Once formalized in presentations, websites, and other artefacts, the claims became dominant deceptions: codified, specific, past- or present-tense deceptions deliberately reproduced across the organization. In this codified form, the deceptions became misconduct that, if detected, could have been acted on by social control agents. We propose that three enabling conditions sustained this transformation: visionary attribution (belief in the founder’s unique foresight), interpretive flexibility (the ambiguity of new technologies that allows multiple plausible meanings), and moral justification (the framing of deception as serving a higher mission). Because the process unfolded diffusely and incrementally, the transformation could only be observed retrospectively, in the accumulation of actions across individuals, artefacts, and time. By tracing this process, we extend research in narratives and in organizational misconduct.