The distinction is more than clever because, as with the premortem, a backcast forces you to exercise dormant parts of your creative brain in ways that a forecast does not. When doing a conventional forecast, it is easy to fall into habitual patterns of thinking – to be “mentally lazy” without even realizing it. When we forecast, we tend to rely on mental shortcuts, which further exposes us to all the cognitive biases we share. With a backcast, we can inoculate against many of the lazy thinking and cognitive bias pitfalls of the conventional forecast simply by putting some real elbow grease into the exercise. The mental work that it takes to imagine a future state – to really picture it and ponder it and work out the implications, ideally on paper or a whiteboard or in a planning journal of some kind – serves as a kind of creative wake-up call for the subconscious. Then, too, our default view of the future tends to be distorted by the present. This is another problem with forecasting, which could be described as extrapolation – assuming what happens next from the perspective of what happened today or yesterday, or last week or last month. Sometimes this works, but too often it misses the mark. As with the premortem technique, backcasting can reveal details that would have otherwise been missed. Imagination not only helps break the bonds of unthinking assumption, it can lead to “ah-ha” type moments through the formation of new connections. For example, Annie Duke talks about the
potential to exist. Then you try to reverse engineer the events and factors that brought about that future state. The backcast supports PMA (positive mental attitude) because instead of imagining failure as the future state, you are focusing on 100% success. When doing a backcast, along with the mental image of achieving your goal, you can picture all the good things that come with it: Financial freedom, more time with your family, a slimmer waistline, a cabin on the lake, or whatever the fruits of that goal may be. It is a backcast, rather than a forecast, because you are working “backwards” rather than forwards.
Hank Blaustein | © 2018 Grant’s Interest Rate Observer. Used by permission. www.GrantsPub.com
66
December 2018
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online