Planning Backwards

Where can you start to create massive, positive change? Here's a tool to help

We’re faced with a “polycrisis,” individually and collectively. We have to chart a path through an increasingly complex, unpredictable world. Over the years the foresight community has figured out a bunch of hacks for doing this; one of these is called backcasting. It’s a standard part of the foresight toolkit, probably used earlier but first described by John B. Robinson in 1982. You may have heard of it, but you may not know that it can be used by individuals as well as companies and governments. In this piece I’ll give you a couple of examples, of using it for personal growth and for geopolitical transformation. This is just to add to your own unapocalyptic toolkit, if you want.

Start From the End

Backcasting is easy to describe: you begin at the end and work your way back step by step to now—the beginning.

You want to do this because in trying to plan, we often end up with a big impossible list of all the sub-problems we have to solve on the way to our goal. Where to start? They all present themselves simultaneously; how do we come up with a plan that simultaneously tackles all of them? For example, let’s take two kinds of polycrisis:

• How do you achieve your own goals, becoming the person you want to be? Let’s say, over the next ten years?

• How can we steer global societies away from the encroaching dystopia of semi-authoritarianism—anocracy—and toward a renewed democracy?

If you start from now and ask yourself, what’s the first step I should take? the result can be brainlock. It’s a situation very similar to writer’s block: the harder you think about it, the more blocked you become. It’s easy to end up throwing up your hands and concluding that planning something like this is impossible.

Backcasting asks you to start by defining the end goal you want, and your deadline. You carefully describe how that future situation (or that future you) is different from the present. Then you ask what necessary actions immediately precede that endpoint. If your goal is to be a rock star in ten years, what do you need to be doing a year before you break out? Where are you, who are you with, what’s your immediate plan at that time?

Having defined the situation and actions being taken at that preceding moment, you take another step backwards, and again ask what kind of circumstances, choices or actions make that moment possible. Rinse and repeat, in a manageable set of small increments, back to the present.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia

You can backcast from some specific ideal scenario, or from some set of principles you want to get to. In theory, it’s easy. It practice, it’s not.

The Pitfalls of Walking Backward

I’ve facilitated backcasting exercises in foresight conference breakout sessions. It’s usually a recipe for chaos. Your group will commit sins including, but not limited to describing the end-state as if it’s always existed; disagreeing on what success even means; using the same words to mean entirely different things; making logical leaps over one or more steps (this year we’re conspiring in a beer hall and next year, we seize power!), and so on. The end result can be like herding cats.

This is where the strategic use of creative constraints that I talked about last week comes in handy. You can constrain your problem space by defining the end point carefully, or by restricting what counts as a description of any step.

Take the example of personal growth over the next decade. You might start by listing all the things you want to accomplish in the next ten years, or by describing in detail the person you’d like to be. These are good endpoints. But then you face the same situation you’re trying to avoid: you’ve got too many possible preceding options. Not knowing which preceding choice is the right one is the same as not knowing which next step to take now. You’re no further ahead.

NPCs to the Rescue

If you’ve played RPGs you’ll be familiar with the idea of rolling a character; if you’ve been a gamemaster, you’ll have created Non-Player Characters—NPCs. In both cases, you’re defining a persona with distinct qualities. You might want to play a rogue or thief character, so you create a backstory and roll or select the qualities of the persona, such as an ability to improvise under pressure, fast-talk their way out of trouble, have nimble fingers, be a good gymnast etc. This is standard practice when role-playing.

Sometimes people use the character-design rules of some game system to describe themselves. It’s an interesting exercise and can help you expose your strengths and weaknesses with more honesty than other techniques, because you do it by distancing yourself slightly from yourself. You as someone else are easier to work with than you as you.

Even if you’re not a gamer, there’s a clue here to a technique for backcasting your own future. It starts with describing a person you would admire and aspire to be like. You don’t start by describing yourself, that’s the point: you describe the admirable qualities of someone else. (Not a real person, note—a made-up one.)

Backcasting Your Self

However you want to describe that person, make sure you list the specific behaviors, habits, ways of reacting to shocks and surprises, etc. that enable them to be successful and admirable. You might also list particular things they have done and milestones they’ve accomplished in their lives such as marriage, financial success, and professional accomplishments.

This is your future self, but it’s not necessarily useful to think of the target persona that way. The list of characteristics they have that you don’t have might seem overwhelming if you do that; it could be impossible to think of yourself becoming them.

Instead, roll up a second character similar to the first but who lacks one or two of its accomplishments. This persona has a quirk or two of yours or is in a circumstance a little more like your own. The exercise is to fully flesh out this person, thinking about their strengths and flaws and how they cope with life as a fully rounded human being in their own right. After doing this, ask what they could be doing, from that grounded beginning, to achieve the one or two things that your previously defined ideal person has. Are they in college, heading for a degree? Are they pregnant? Are they working to serve some community? Whatever they’re up to, the aim is to understand what kind of person this second character is and what makes it possible that they might, one day, become as accomplished as the first.

Now, create a third character based on the second, doing the same replacement/subtractive exercise. This person resembles you a little more but is also more accomplished. Once again, fully flesh them out: how do they function? What enables them to work under pressure? What supports do they have? How did they get them?

Repeat this process several more times, crafting a series of personas that become closer and closer to who you are now. This works because each of these people is in a stable situation but also on a clearly defined path to becoming the next one.

If you’ve done the exercise diligently, you should end up with a description of yourself, as you are now, with maybe just one thing you want to accomplish or change about yourself in the next year. That one change doesn’t magically turn you into the person you want to be. But it puts you on a road that you now understand, where each milepost is visible and achievable from the one before it.

This is backcasting for personal transformation.

Note that in doing it this way, I’ve thrown out the usual backcasting practice of changes happening in linear time. Instead, the difference between now and then is turned into a difference between you as you are, and someone nearly like you. Thinking about time geometrically (as a line or 4th dimension) has its uses, but it can block your thinking, too. In this case, by turning ‘future’ selves into different people (maybe living right now) you can avoid some of the ‘what’s next’ pitfalls in planning.

Now let’s look at backcasting to save democracy and freedom for the next generation.