Dealing with uncertainty and complexity.
In an increasingly complex world with accelerating technological innovation, social and environmental change, it can be paralysingly tricky to plan ahead. We don’t know what the future holds. We don’t know how humans, competitors, systems or industries will evolve or respond to a changing world. We can only explore possibilities.
In this knowledge vacuum, organisational decision-making processes can fall prey to circuitous debate and be more vulnerable to cognitive biases, including favouring the status quo, authority figures’ views, or anchoring on data that confirms prior beliefs.
So when the stakes are high, how do you make decisions, plan ahead or make bold moves with confidence?
Simply put, how do you move forwards?
Reverse models
It comes down to the process you follow, and whilst it sounds counter-intuitive, backwards is part of the answer.
To illustrate, below are four frameworks that variously use concepts such as backcasting, backwards mapping, reverse engineering or working backwards to move forwards across foresight, social change, strategy, and innovation, respectively.
The backwards factor
Whilst each framework above has nuances and differences, I've generalised to distill the power of the 'backwards' factor to five points. These are:
Outcomes: provides clarity on the desired outcome or conditions, as this is the starting point, with efficiencies resulting from this focus.
Paths: establishes the link between desired outcomes and the present and planned activities.
Assumptions: surfaces the underlying assumptions for stakeholder alignment, testing or ongoing measurement. This is particularly useful when exploring new ideas or dealing with complexity, as testing is how you build knowledge of the new and what works.
Decisions: improves decision-making via clarity on points 1 - 3 above.
Transformations: works back from a goal, creating space to be aspirational and to leap-frog the human bias for linear thinking - a bias that extrapolates the present forwards.
Starting with the desired outcome (be that a customer need or job to be done, a business goal or a preferred future) and working backwards enables a subtle mindset shift. One that can move you from the constraints of today's status quo towards exploring transformative possibilities.
For example, in foresight, backcasting from a preferred future empowers the shift from: 'how do I make the future better?'- an optimisation question - to: 'what future do I want?' - an invention question that explores what might be.
I suggest that this mindset shift is in fact the superpower of working backwards.
Sreehc
Aniretak
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