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Plan backward from success and failure
Two exercises
The first exercise is a back-cast. Take a goal, picture it as accomplished three years from now, and trace how the team got there. The second is a pre-mortem: it is three years from now, the effort failed, and the question is how that happened. Together they show more of the landscape than a plan built forward from today.
Scheduled reviews
Strategic planning sessions tend to happen when something is wrong, and they focus on what is new. A calendar slot for reviewing goals, set regardless of whether anything seems wrong, can reveal a better way to do what is already being done.
Gut decisions
Not every decision needs a deliberate process. A lot of daily choices run on gut and in the moment, and that is fine. Intuition does need to answer to a deliberate process at some point, though. My gut told me to is never a full answer to why, and if the reasoning can't be taught to another person, there is a problem with it.
Who invented the pre-mortem?
Psychologist Gary Klein popularized the pre-mortem in a 2007 article in the Harvard Business Review. It builds on a 1989 study by Deborah Mitchell, Jay Russo, and Nancy Pennington. They found that imagining an event has already happened, which they called prospective hindsight, increased people's ability to correctly identify reasons for future outcomes by about 30 percent. Klein's version asks a team to assume a project has failed and write down why.
Why do plans so often run late?
Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky named the planning fallacy in 1979. In a 1994 study by Roger Buehler, Dale Griffin, and Michael Ross, students predicted they would finish their thesis in an average of about 34 days. The actual average was about 56 days. Even when asked for a worst-case estimate, the students' average guess of about 49 days came in below what they took.
Where did the idea of backcasting begin?
Backcasting was introduced in 1982 by the Canadian researcher John Robinson in a paper on energy futures. Instead of forecasting from current trends, it starts from a desired future and works backward to the steps that would lead there. The method has since been used in sustainability and urban planning. Sweden's Natural Step organization, founded in 1989, applies a version of it.
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