Transforming how you create your forward momentum in turbulent times

March 2020 – the start of the lockdowns in the pandemic.    Pivoting to online and WFH, wearing masks, gloves and lots of hand gel.  Using our elbows for door, washing groceries, changing processes and relationships….

Could we then have forecasted then what has happened in the last five years? 

It is March 2025.   Step back and see how you and your firm have adapted in the last five years.   Congratulate yourselves on how you modified and adapted how you now engage and interact.

But wait  — it will be March 2030.  Economic uncertainty, climate instability and energy concerns will have impacted the last five years of our lives.   How will you and your firm adapt how you engaged and interacted?     If you could backcast what you wanted to achieve in 2030 when you were in 2025, how would have that looked like?

For myself on a personal note, in March 2020 I was caring for my chronically ill husband who ended up in the hospital for five months during this period (and yes, he got COVID while in the hospital, which made communication even that more challenging).   I was already working remotely as a consultant with a team in Asia and a group in the US as an expert, plus teaching graduate business students (and pivoted to online teaching).  I was alone except for health care professionals once my husband returned home.  I had to organize renting a hospital bed for our living room in a pandemic.   Social tools allowed me 24/7 reach to friends around the world for support. I had work colleagues trying to help from their homebases.   I had food delivery and very early morning visits to the store to minimize contact for his sake.  I worked closely with my local pharmacy to keep both him and I in the best possible place in terms of our health.

But I knew that I had to work through this and keep going.  So I pivoted on a number of items, but kept the importance of certain elements of my life going.   So I weightlifted in my living room and outside my front door.  I fenced online with colleagues using Zoom.  I kept teaching online to keep an income flow when consulting became unstable.   I moderated events online, using my combined tech and comms skills.   I published, I presented and I made sure I was still active and relevant.  This included participating in a remote TEDx.

One skill I have practiced extensively through this period is backcasting.  It is similar but different to forecasting.   Forecasting is predictions based on expectations and likelihood.    Backcasting picks outcomes for the future and creates paths to try to achieve them, working around predicted and unexpected  situations to create alternative paths.

In 1988, John Robinson wrote an article on backcasting where he said: “..backcasting techniques that reveal the possibility, and test the feasibility and impacts, of alternative futures. The focus thus shifts from prediction and likelihood to feasibility and choice.”

Robinson made a relevant point specific to how we have dealt with the last five years.  He wrote “…the search for the most likely future may actually be dangerous in that it permits the existence of choice to be obscured by the apparent existence of necessity. In other words, the most likely future may well not be the most desirable one, given the range of possible futures. What are needed therefore are not techniques which increasingly converge on the most likely future, but techniques which reveal and test the feasibility and impacts of alternative futures, in order that meaningful choices can be made among them.”

We have had to make choices, based on alternatives, but still with particular goals and outcomes in mind.   Though my Institute, I help firms and individuals lean into backcasting to create playbooks.   I offer services and workshops to help others transform their playbook development with backcasting techniques.

In writing this post, I also went back to my 2020 predictions on AI and automation which prove the old adage that we expect things to happen quicker in five years than they actually do.    But that’s a story for another post.  😉