Backcasting

John B. Robinson · 1982

Start from the future you want, then work backwards to what would have had to happen for it to be reached.

Its place in the frameworkVision Core›Vision Statement

What it does

It is the deliberate opposite of forecasting. Rather than extending today’s trends and accepting where they land, it fixes a desirable end state and asks what chain of conditions leads there. That reversal is what makes it a vision tool: it treats the future as something chosen rather than predicted.

Reach for it when: When planning keeps producing next year plus a percentage, and when a vision needs a path rather than only a picture.
Where it stops: It says nothing about feasibility. A perfectly reasoned path can lead back from a future that was never available.

John B. Robinson, “Energy Backcasting: A Proposed Method of Policy Analysis”, Energy Policy, 1982.

Why it sits at Vision Statement

The future state the organisation is working towards — far enough away to be worth the effort, close enough to be reached, and specific enough that someone could tell whether it had been.

A model is only useful when you reach for it at the right moment. This one answers a question that arises here — so it is filed here, and nowhere else. These are the working areas it serves:

The statementCollins & Porras on the envisioned future — an ambitious goal with a long horizon, paired with a vivid description of what reaching it looks like.
ReachabilityKotter’s criteria for an effective vision — imaginable, desirable, feasible, focused, flexible and communicable — of which feasible is the one usually skipped.
What it rules outThe strategy literature on choice as exclusion: a position that permits everything commits to nothing.
ProgressKaplan & Norton on translating a long-horizon direction into measures that move within a planning cycle.

All of Vision Statement

What it touches elsewhere

Nothing in a business is decided on its own. A conclusion reached with this model at Vision Statement lands in these other cores, whether or not anyone follows it there.

Goal CoreLong term goals are the vision expressed at a horizon short enough to be planned against.
Mission StatementThe mission describes the work being done now to close the distance the vision names.
Brand CoreThe narrative carries the vision outward; where the two disagree, the narrative is what people believe.
Time CoreA horizon is a date, and it belongs in the same planning rhythm as everything else with one.

Filed at the same place

These answer questions that arise at Vision Statement too. Where they disagree with this one, the disagreement is the useful part.

The envisioned futureA long-range goal paired with a vivid description of what it will be like to have arrived.

Elsewhere in Vision Core

These are other people’s models, named here so you can go to the source and use them properly. The Omnigoal is not affiliated with their authors and is not endorsed by them; nothing of theirs is reproduced here — no canvas, no diagram, no wording. Each is described in our own words, with the originator credited, because the framework is a place to put thinking, not a replacement for the people who did it. Model names and trademarks belong to their respective owners and are used here only to refer to the work itself.

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