MB#6 - Not Towards the Future, But Back From It

The Single Best Way to a Credible, Long-Term Plan

Your strategic planning team has defined a long-term vision of the future. This is no mere vision statement - it includes lots of metrics. Proud of its accomplishment, it doesn’t take long for a concern to develop. What if the vision of the future isn’t realistic?

How can you ensure it’s not just a figment of a fantastic imagination? And how do you implement it effectively?

The Challenge

Your team has defined a description of the company’s future. But this is no ordinary vision statement.

In keeping with the advice given in MB#5 - How Does your Team Generate a Precise Future Vision?, it has measurable details. In fact, it may look like a wish-list of sorts!

Why? It stands alone - a compilation of target metrics and initiatives which should create these results. The problem is, they represent an outcome which only manifests after some 15-30-years in the future. It’s impossible to tell whether the team was optimistic or pessimistic.

Without a reliable method to follow, many companies stop at this point. Eager to share what they have created, they announce the details to their stakeholders. Employees, board members, customers, suppliers and others agree…it looks amazing.

But there are a few who suggest caution. What are the underpinnings of this picture of the future? Are they realistic? How will the listed initiatives produce those numbers in reality?

Younger staff may even be more critical. While the output is way better than the average, vague vision statement, it still begs the above questions.

In other words, there’s a credibility problem. And as the queries mount, you begin to doubt yourself.

After all, these are well-founded concerns. While there are no guarantees you could ever give, is there a way to bridge the gap between the desired end-result and today’s reality? Can you address the skepticism?

The Merlin Factor

As a consultant, in 2000 I wondered the same thing. Shortly before my first strategic planning retreat for a real client, I came across the following paper by Charles F. Smith.

This article spoke to the power of creating a future and engaging staff as the company worked to fulfill it. (It’s available here in our library.) However, it didn’t offer any details on how the process could be done during a strategic planning retreat

Fortunately, I knew such methods existed from my formal training as an Operations Researcher/Industrial Engineer at Cornell. Drawing on my quantitative background, I realized that there could be a way to tell a “future-back-to-the-present” story in numbers. After all, this is similar to the way planners build Gantt charts - a staple of project management.

In my first retreat, we built such a picture on a flip-chart. In subsequent retreats, I urged teams to undertake the exercise using a spreadsheet. Furthermore, a Gantt chart of game-changing projects could be added to the same chart.

Much later, I discovered the term “backcasting”, which refers to the movement from future to past, employing metrics. The entire activity, which always includes projects, is called the “Merlin Process.” Here are the documents produced from one stage to the next, starting with the output as described in MB#5.

In this imaginary case study of Fictional Credit Union, they began with a list of final results by a certain year, and the projects or initiatives intended to bring them about.