In innovation work that spans various professional contexts, there is an overreliance upon verbal explanations and one-way presentations, as opposed to demonstrating, trying and performing. Organizing project teams across organizations and professional competencies relies upon creating active collaborative activities that allow participants to both move forward with the project, while reflecting upon how they work together. Innovation work involves not only discovering what could be possible, but also bringing novel solutions into practice, and driving the business to get them there. This contribution seeks to explore how staged role-play activities can raise practice-specific issues. The authors argue that by staging prospective project trajectories, especially at the outset of a project, the partner team members have the opportunity to orient their future actions according to potential desired and undesired futures.