Backcasting is one of several methods futurists use to understand possible futures. Futurists, of course, cannot “tell the future,” but they work hard to offer realistic scenarios for others to aim for and work toward in their respective lives and/or lines of work. And, if enough people work towards a particular scenario, the likelihood of it being fulfilled will of course be bigger. This method differs from two other more commonly used futures studies methods, namely “forecasting” and “foresight.”
Forecasting is what most corporate executives use when they want to engage in longer-term planning. It is a fairly simple method of extrapolation, using historical and present-day data to draw a curve in a diagram and then extrapolate it according to the planning period in question, whether it be a quarter, a year, or two to three years. Nevertheless, in this kind of fairly basic analysis, one must also take known and/or assumed influences into consideration, such as short-term economic, demographic, or climatic changes, expected technological developments, new competitors entering, or existing ones leaving one’s market (if one operates in a “market”), etc. Here the focus is on the past versus the present, the future being a consequence of their relation.
The foresight method is more analytical in its approach. According to Joseph Voros’s model, it starts out from freezing the moment, asking “what is happening?” Then the process itself starts by asking what seems to happen (analysis), what is really happening (interpretation), and what might then happen (prospection). The final task hence becomes to discuss and decide what to do and how. This method focuses on the present and the future, giving less attention to the past than the forecasting model. Since it is less about quantitative and more about qualitative analysis, it takes more time to do.
Backcasting is a model that combines the above two methods. It starts, interestingly enough, by asking what the “desired future” is. The “future” is hence not the result of the analysis but its starting point. Having stated a “desired future,” which ideally lies at least eight to ten years ahead, and even further away if it is about infrastructure, environmental, or socio-economic developments, this model is all about asking—step-by-step—what will make the “desired future” become true and which premises will pave the way for that to happen, all the way “back” from the desired future to the current state of affairs. Once they have mapped out which premises actors would need to subscribe to in order to take the required actions that eventually lead to the desired future, planners need to understand how to make the actors assume what they would need to assume—i.e., how to make the actors give priority to the premises they would need to give priority to if they are to contribute to the desired future. Once planners understand that, they can design the necessary incentives that will make the actors contribute to the desired future.
This is, in other words, a matter of designing incentives rather than considering consequences of existing or possible circumstances. The approach I am presenting here is called “The Critical Path Theory.” It builds on two different theories, developed independently from each other and first combined into a matrix in my book The Citizen Lobby: From Capacity to Influence. The first part of this matrix is meant to answer the question, “Who?” This is because incentives must target a given target group’s situations and roles in society, or it will be impossible for the target group to respond to the incentive. To encourage farmers to stop using fossil fuels for their mechanical equipment or to encourage top diplomats to stop traveling by air—since both pollute the environment—is meaningless until a better and equally efficient alternative is available. So, all incentives must be relevant to the target group if they are to be meaningful parts of the plan.
For this purpose, The Critical Path model uses Jürgen Habermas’ Public Sphere Theory, splitting the society into five different realms. Starting from the individual level, moving towards the collective levels, he lists (i) the private intimate realm, meaning individuals on the private family level; (ii) the private economic realm, meaning the society’s economic and intellectual elite, whose members also are included in the private intimate realm but then with other roles and priorities; (iii) the public economic realm, including both the corporate and NGO sectors, generating products, services, and economic output—typically owned and/or managed by the private economic realm. The fourth realm he calls the public intimate realm, which is media, being the realm that communicates and conveys cultural influences to all the other realms. All these four realms do their best to influence the fifth realm (the governing realm) in their respective favor: the two economic realms through lobbying, the media through both direct and indirect communication, and the private individuals through parliamentary (or other kinds of) elections.
It is obvious that the same incentives cannot be offered to all these realms. Not even regular individuals and individual members of the economic and/or intellectual elite may respond in the same way to the same incentives. And perhaps they must act differently so that their combined efforts help the overall development towards the desired future. And individual and corporate incentives are also likely to differ, and so on.
The second part of this matrix is meant to answer the question, “Why?” If one wants to motivate people rather than force them, one needs to know what makes them “tick.” For this purpose, this model applies what I have termed the Cultural Formula—an analytical tool first presented in my book Traffic: A Book About Culture, analyzing cultures’ impact on multilateral cooperation. Here our actions are described as results of (i) our cultural values, (ii) the social and physical environment we act within, (iii) our collective and private experiences, (iv) our resources, and (v) our resolve. The first three are what determine our culturally derived premises (assumptions about life), and the last two how we act in response to what we observe and/or are exposed to, based on how we assess these observations when applying the (cultural) premises we subscribe to.
An individual subscribing to the premise that money is the key to happiness is likely to respond positively to any incentives involving lowering taxes. A person who gives priority to the premise that equality is needed for (a desired) social harmony will, on the other hand, respond more favorably to those incentives that suggest a more even distribution of wealth. Which premises we subscribe to are likely to depend on the first three parameters of the above Cultural Formula, and this formula argues that these three combined parameters constitute the foundation of our cultural logic. This logic can only change—if that is required to achieve the desired future—by changing any of these three parameters. How that can be done depends on which of Habermas’ realms the targeted group is part of. Representatives of Habermas’ public economic realm, and especially the commercial sector, are likely to respond negatively to incentives that include higher minimum salaries and shorter working hours, while most representatives of the private intimate realm, i.e., private individuals, are likely to respond enthusiastically to exactly that. The matrix then comes to look as follows:
The backcasting team’s task will now be to analyze which of the different realms’ members’ values, premises, and/or resources need to change if the desired future (indicated in the column to the right of the far-right column) are to become reality. Since “backcasting” means moving from society’s current behavior (indicated in the far right column) towards the values that drives this behavior (indicated in the far left column), and then back again—and individuals are the smallest common denominator of any society—this process must start from the individual’s behavior at the matrix’s bottom right corner (#1) and move towards the society’s governing values in the top right corner (#40).
Once the required change of behavior is understood, one needs to look at the level of resolve the respective realms have. One can assume that the more the realm’s members can gain from its behavior, the greater the resolve they have to act in that way. But the relative ease with which the behavior can be maintained may also matter. Having understood the realm-members’ level of resolve for the behavior that needs to change in order to achieve the desired future, the same analysis must be made for the kind of resources the respective realms possess. It is of course quite likely that the economic elite and the corporate sector have plenty of resources, but the need for resources can also be relative to the behavior. Racism doesn’t need a lot of resources, nor does what is collectively termed “terrorism.”
Moving further to the left, we must now map the premises that cause the behavior that needs to change in order to achieve the desired future. This is to understand why people do what they do. Here we must identify which premises lead the realm’s members to take the (undesirable) action they take. For instance, if criminal behavior is the “problem” we identified in the far-right column, then it is likely that one of the problematic premises to be addressed is that the “me” is given far greater weight and importance by this collective than that of the “society.” Another premise that also may have to be addressed here is the human need for being a part of a network, and if one’s network is criminal, it is hard to just move over to a non-criminal one.
From this column we move even further to the left, eventually mapping out the cultural values these different realms subscribe to. Each box in the matrix will need its own research effort—and by combining face-to-face discussions with AI-supported desk research, a fairly clear, albeit not scientifically proven, picture can emerge. Once all the boxes are covered, the team needs to go back again, step-by-step, to box number 1, identifying the keys to the overall behavior that must change if it is to lead to the desired future. This is done by comparing one column at a time (for instance, all the respective premises) to see if there are any mismatches between the realms that need to be addressed. Then one also needs to analyze all the individual realms’ respective horizontal lines—from “values” to “action.” What causes the undesirable action? Is it a premise originating from environmental conditions, or is it a lack of resources? Identifying these key hindrances for the desired future to materialize, one can build an incentive structure that makes people want to do what needs to be done in order to—collectively—reach it. Backcasting is a method for understanding not only “what” but also “why.” If we do not address the reasons for people’s undesirable socioeconomic or environmental behavior, it does not matter how we try to prohibit what they do or punish them for doing it. To help address this issue, I developed the Critical Path model, providing long-term planners with a practical tool for doing their job.
Leif Thomas Olsen
Thomas Olsen, a native Swede, is Associate Professor Emeritus at lifelong-learning institution Rushmore University. From 1981 to 1999 he was a corporate manager across Europe, Asia, and the Americas. His dual-focus research project “Cultures’ impact on multilateral cooperation” was published by Raider Publishing International under the title Traffic: A Book About Culture. In 2010, Raider Publishing also published his book Good Governance in the New Millennium, being his earliest draft for a citizen’s lobby. In 2015, following an EU-funded project at German Leuphana Universität, Meson Press published his book The Citizen Lobby: From Capacity to Influence.
