In my last blog I introduced the idea of “Episodes”, things with a time-dimension, a beginning, middle and an end, such as a story, a project or any procedure. This blog explores the question of how predictable the outcome of an episode can be when you are at the start of it.
Unforeseen things happen. Worse than that, many things are simply unforeseeable. Yet we still get stuff done. We build houses and bridges, bring the shopping home, cook meals, and get away on holidays. How?
Well, first you need to understand that there are two types of episode. The first sort of episode is one where the outcome is absolutely predictable from the beginning. Consider a computer program. You know the exact state of the data that goes in at the beginning. You know the exact operations that are going to be carried out on it. After all, it’s just a load of binary switch settings, on or off, and no in-between state! It follows that if you know the input to a computer program, you can exactly predict the output. The same is true of the machines in a production line, or the chemistry going on in test tube, or even, if you are very, very careful and exact, following a recipe to cook a cake. We call these episodes “prescriptive”, because the outcome is “prescribed”. We can forecast the outcome with certainty because we know what the going-in state is at the beginning of the episode and we know that the steps (sub-episodes) are also going to be prescriptive during the episode.
In the vast majority of episodes, however, we neither know the state of things at the beginning, because it’s far too big and complicated, nor do we know exactly how the steps in between are going to go, because of all the countless other events (other episodes) they depend on. For the most part of life and business, therefore, we cannot forecast exactly what is going to happen and what the outcome is going to be. That’s why holidays sometimes go all wrong, projects overrun and overspend (often dramatically) and disasters overwhelm us. The future almost never turns out how we expected. This is the second type of episodes. We call them “ascriptive”. That’s because you don’t know what the causes (events, sub-episodes) are until after you’ve got to the end, upon which you “ascribe” them to the episode. People talk of “Post-Implementation Reviews” of projects, which is first time when they really know what brought them to the outcome! Hindsight is a wonderful thing, so for any given outcome you can ascribe, or backcast, what its causes, were and so what the episode was.
It turns out that backcasting combined with the idea of episodes is a very useful tool. The reason is that most animals, but humans in particular, are able to have prospective hindsight. They can imagine future states and then imagine how they could have come about. It’s a vital survival technique. For example, you can stand at a kerb and plan to cross the road. On seeing a lorry approaching, you can imagine an episode where the lorry knocks you down. If you want to get to the other side of the road without being knocked down, you realise with imaginary hindsight that you waited until the lorry had passed. So you wait – and survive. Congratulations, you just used backcasting! The philosopher Karl Popper put it neatly when he said we have the capacity to “Let our conjectures die in our stead”.
The reason that we and most other animals use backcasting habitually is that the world around us changes too fast for us to catch up. Everything we see is slightly out of date, because even the speed of light is limited to 299,792,458m/s. Everything we hear is out of date because the speed of sound is limited to 343m/s. So we have to conjecture what we think is going to be the outcome of situations and then act on what we think is going to be the best episode to get there. Goalkeepers involved in penalty shoot-outs know this all too well! This is the natural default way in which our massively complex brains (100-150 trillion synaptic connections functioning in permutational networks) operate.
How do we use backcasting to help avoid holidays going all wrong, projects overrunning and overspending and disasters overwhelming us? The answer is the same as the answer that avoids you getting run over by a lorry when trying to cross the road. You first decide on the outcome you want in very specific terms and then imagine – hypothesise – how it has (in your imagination) already come about. For example, if you have to catch a plane to go on holiday you probably start your planning with the time the plane is going to take off. In your imagination, your’re on that plane. You then work backwards. When do you need to be (“were you”) through the Security Gate? When do you need to be (“were you”) at the airport? When do you need to be (“were you”) in the taxi? When do you need to finish (“were you finished”) breakfast? When do you need to (“did you”) wake up? And thus, for what time do you now need to set the alarm? What is more, if any of these steps happens differently from how you imagined, you can usually find a successful alternative path by re-backcasting. Sometimes the upset to your plans can even result in you finding a better, smarter path to getting to that holiday destination!
You’ve probably come across the current fashion for “manifestation”. Well, this is what manifestation really is and why it works.
As I have explained, your brain is extremely familiar with doing this. We just don’t apply it systematically in the right places. We can apply it to any goal we want to achieve or to the anticipation of any threat. What it requires, however, is that we know the outcome that we want first. How to vision an outcome, and to do it in precise binary terms without using numbers is the subject for another blog. The good news is that there is not one but many ways to do this. Moreover, once you know the outcome you want the very uncertainty, the unforeseeable-ness, of the future, starts to work in your favour. It is no accident that we, along with most other animals, have evolved the capability to backcast, to imagine futures and to backwards-imagine from them as readily as we can forecast.
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