Look Backwards to Get to the Future

I have mentioned several times that I am interested in futurism, meaning forecasting trends, looking at possible future events, just exploring what the future may look like. I am especially interested in applying this to the field of human resources. To that end I do a lot of reading and, as I have also mentioned before, one of my favorite books is Futuring: The Exploration of the Future by Edward Cornish. There are a number of good lessons that can learned from this book and I will be, and have been, posting about many of them.

We are all aware of "forecasting". This is the method that the meteorologist uses to tell us the potential weather for tomorrow or for the next week. It is using current information to predict what may be happening in the future. But the one method that I wanted to bring to your attention is one you may already be somewhat aware of, and may have applied, but just did not know what it is called. This is "backcasting."

Backcasting is according to Cornish where "we postulate a future goal, event or circumstance and then try to develop a sequence of steps or stages to explain the imagined future event or goal came to pass." Cornish further explains that backcasting "... does not begin with where we are, but rather with where we want to be or might be at some future date."

From that point the task becomes to develop a scenario on how that event came to be. You work backwards developing what conditions must exist, what events must occur, what steps must be taken to determine if that future can actually occur. As Cornish says "Backcasting can be used to decide what is likely to happen in the future and to determine how to achieve one's chosen goal." Probably the most famous example of backcasting is President Kennedy's goal of landing a man on the moon. NASA had to take that goal and backcast to determine what was needed to accomplish it.

In terms of you HR department this can be a very useful tool. Suppose you get the mandate that in two years you will have to be serving twice as many employees, in twice as many locations, with half the staff you currently have. What would you do? You would paint the picture and then work backwards thinking of methods, times, abilities, staffing, automation, costs, etc. You would determine whether that goal could be accomplished or, if not, what an acceptable alternative might be.

So as you are tasked in your HR department to be more strategic think of using the method of backcasting to be creative and to look at possible alternatives. Look backwards to look forward.

8 Steps to Thinking Creatively: Overcoming Paradigm Paralysis

I have mentioned before that I am reading Futuring: The Exploration of the Future by Edward Cornish. It is absolutely chocked full of great ideas and information. In Chapter 10 he talks about Inventing the Future. Well to "invent the future" you have to think creatively. To provide some guidance on this Cornish tells about the work of Michael Michalko, who studied the work of many of the world's most creative geniuses. (His book is Cracking Creativity: The Secrets of Creative Genius) Michalko came up with a list of eight steps that he found had been used by creative geniuses of the past. These are:

1. Look at a problem in may different ways. Much like Leonardo da Vinci did in looking at his creations from multiple vantage points. He drew the different points of view. (And the added benefit if you draw is that maybe some day you will be famous too.)
2. Make your thoughts visible. Diagrams are an excellent tool to make your thoughts visible. (Hey it worked for Galileo).
3. Produce a lot. And this means alot. Edison is famous for this as is Issac Asimov, who wrote 450 books. To my way of thinking this is similar to Gladwell's 10,000 hours concept as found in Outliers: The Story of Success.
4. Combine Things in new ways. New relationships of well-known concepts or ideas may spark something for you. It worked for Albert Einstein with E=mc2 (2 =squared). No one had thought of combining energy, mass and the speed of light together.
5. Force Relationships. Samuel Morse came up with the solution to weak telegraph signals one day by watching a team of horses being switched out at a relay station thus getting the idea of boosting the signal as it went along the wires. (Hmmm... how can I apply that to HR?)
6. Think in opposites. What if we ate dessert before dinner or we grew younger rather than older. (Benjamin Button anyone?) How might this apply to incentives versus rewards?
7. Think metaphorically. Can you recognize resemblences between very different situations? Take a lesson from Aristotle.
8. Prepare for the benefits of chance. Chance happens. As Louis Pasteur said "Luck favors the prepared mind."

You may want to print this list out and keep it on your desk. Make yourself a WW?D sign, where you substitute the ? with the names of Albert, Aristotle, Thomas, Leonardo or your personal favorite genius.

Thinking creatively will help you overcome one major problem PARADIGM PARALYSIS. Paradigm paralysis can best be described by the sentence "We have always done it that way because.... " How many times have we heard that a collegue or manager? Well don't let them get away with it. And don't allow yourself to be lulled into thinking this way.

So think creatively... become an HR genius.