Backcasting: Creating a Strategic Roadmap from the Future

Note: this is a research excerpt from Roxanne Nicolussi’s “Bigger Thinking for Smaller Enterprises”, published in 2017 and licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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A vision means nothing without the tools to turn it into reality. As Kotter (1995) explains, the basic elements of the vision should be organized into a strategy for achieving that vision so that the transformation does not disintegrate into a set of unrelated and confusing directions and activities (Fernandez & Rainey, 2006, p.169). Emelo (2011) has outlined four crucial steps when it comes to using foresight to collaborate on a vision: collaboration from people of different levels and perspectives, reflection on the past, envisioning the future by sorting through the long-term implications of trends for unexpected challenges and unexploited opportunities, and strategizing to gauge the required commitment for each future opportunity as well as assessing its impact.

A well-articulated direction stimulates behavioural responses in the organization, ideally in the desired direction. There are, however, cases in which pitfalls and unintended consequences result in a realized direction different from the one that is desired (Dyson et al., 2015). It is for this reason that a clearly articulated vision in combination with a clearly articulated roadmap can increase the potential to achieve…