Designing Strategy From the Future In
Strategic planning often begins with today — with current constraints, known capabilities, and incremental projections. It’s a familiar and comfortable starting point. But in environments defined by volatility, complexity, and accelerating change, present-forward planning tends to reinforce the status quo. It narrows imagination precisely when leaders need to expand it.
Across multiple strategic disciplines — scenario planning, future-back strategy, and even the tactical process of a premortem — a shared insight emerges: you don’t build the future by extending the present. You build it by standing in the future and reasoning backward.
These future-first processes make assumptions visible, articulate the conditions for success, and expose the obstacles that present-day thinking tends to obscure.
While approaches of backcasting in scenario planning, future-back thinking, and the premortem share a common orientation, they work at different altitudes. Understanding how they relate — and how to use them in strategic discussions to reveal hidden risks — is key to applying them well.
The Problem With Starting From Today
When planning begins with today’s environment, today’s resources, and today’s organizational realities, a subtle trap forms. Leaders unknowingly frame their future within the limits of the present. Budgets, structures, habits, and assumptions quietly shape what feels possible.
This often leads to:
- Incremental thinking (“10% better, not fundamentally different”)
- Overvaluing existing constraints
- Underestimating disruption
- Strategies that reinforce internal comfort rather than relevance to future customer needs or market conditions
The result is a strategy that is logical, well-structured, and immediately understandable — but rarely transformative. And for those businesses facing disruptive and volatile environments, transformation is often necessary.
Future-first methods interrupt this pattern by shifting the vantage point. They ask leaders to imagine a different future first and then reason backwards to understand what conditions would have to exist for that future to emerge. The focus of these future-back processes is on defining conditions before determining action steps.
Three Lenses, Three Altitudes of Future-First Strategy
Although they share a future-oriented logic, backcasting in scenario planning, future-back thinking, and the premortem operate at different altitudes. Each answers a different question, and they are not interchangeable. But each can play a role in your strategy development.
The focus of these future-back processes is on defining conditions before determining action steps.
Backcasting (Systems Altitude)
Backcasting is a method rooted in the discipline of scenario planning. It does not envision the future of the organization. Instead, it envisions possible futures of the external environment — economic, technological, regulatory, demographic, or social futures.
In scenario planning, teams imagine alternative futures shaped by forces such as technology, regulation, demographics, geopolitics, or social norms. From the selected scenarios, they work backward to ask:
- What would have to happen in society for this scenario to emerge?
- What structural, cultural, or policy shifts would be required?
- What early signals would indicate the scenario is unfolding?
The goal is foresight, not to predict a single future state. Backcasting helps leaders understand how external forces might evolve and how the organization may need to adapt. It creates strategic awareness, and identifies the weak signals to monitor going forward.
Future-Back Strategy (Enterprise Altitude)
Future-back thinking shifts the focus inward. Rather than ask what might happen in the world, it asks: What do we want our organization to become? It starts with a long-term vision — sometimes 5, 10, or even 20 years out — and walks backward to clarify:
- The capabilities the organization would need
- The business models or value propositions required
- The relationships it would have to build or redefine
- The investment choices it would need to make along the way
Where backcasting explores the environment, future-back imagines new organizational identity, ambition, and possibility. It creates a compelling picture of the future organization and the necessary internal conditions.
The Premortem (Initiative Altitude)
At the most tactical altitude, the premortem begins with failure. It asks teams to imagine that a new or planned project or initiative has been scoped out and has failed spectacularly — then articulate all the reasons why.
This reversal unlocks candor and mitigates the optimism bias which is common among leaders.. It also surfaces hidden risks found in:
- Conflicting assumptions held by different teams or leaders
- Cultural or behavioral vulnerabilities that are often not discussed
- External dependencies leaders may overlook, like the reaction of competitors
Where the backcasting of scenario planning explores external uncertainty and future-back strategy clarifies a transformative enterprise vision, the premortem reveals fragility. It strengthens execution by naming what could go wrong so that tactics can be developed to address them proactively.
The Shared Principle: Start at the End
Though these methods operate at different altitudes — systems, enterprise, and initiative — they are animated by a common principle: the start at the end, not the beginning.
Rather than immediately jumping into action items or timelines, the team asks:
“What must be true — about us, our stakeholders, our systems, our decisions, and our environment — for this future to become real?”
This question moves strategy out of the realm of hope by focusing discussion on the underlying conditions that enable or prevent progress:
- Beliefs
- Capabilities
- Incentives
- Structures
- Behaviors
- Relationships
- Shared meaning
By doing this work in the early stages of strategy development, efforts to activate and sustain momentum will be rewarded. Your strategy process becomes less about predicting and more about preparing and creating a coherent set of actions that are responsive to the risks inherent in change.
Leaders who start from today tend to repeat it. Leaders who start from the future free themselves from the assumptions that define the present.
Leading From the Future
Leaders who start from today tend to repeat it. Leaders who start from the future free themselves from the assumptions that define the present which enables them to envision a more transformative future state.
Future-first methods — backcasting, future-back strategy, and premortems — each offer a way to expand perspective, uncover blind spots, and clarify direction. In different ways, each answers the same essential question:
“What must be true for us to achieve the future we imagine?”
This is the work that precedes action planning and execution — the work that removes friction and waste before they appear.
