Then & Now
Introducing Tom Kerwin
Friends,
I hope that all is well with you and yours, and that this e-mail finds you on a boat with shoddy connection, in the tropics, three months after I sent it.
A couple of updates before we go-go
After what essentially was a fly-in, fly-out, I got home from the Cannes Lions festival yesterday afternoon. The event, to the vast majority of visitors anyway, is a mix of corporate presentations, nonstop meetings, and more or less intense partying. If you have never been, it is worth going, if for no other reason than the sheer immensity of scale.
Given that I am who I am - and I mean that personality-wise, not as a display of falsely perceived self-importance - I do not really do the whole after-hours party scene. Having said that, Spotify flew in Foo Fighters to perform at their private beach the night after our talk. I would obviously have loved to have seen that.
The presentation that James and I gave was, I felt, very good. The audience members that saw it appeared to agree; my one disappointment was that there were not more of them, particularly given last year’s immense success. Although it may well be my ego speaking, I am starting to worry a bit about marketers’ penchant for escapism. Certainly, one might argue that is what the Cannes festival itself is, but the fact of the matter is that they can no longer afford to wave The Long and The Short of It in the face of the rest of the organization whenever asked to demonstrate a return. We are well on our way into a new financial era, and marketing is about to come under a pressure it has not experienced for decades. A hell of a lot of marketers will be caught by surprise, even though the rest of us have seen it coming for quite literally years - and tried to warn them.
More on that in a future newsletter. Today, it gives me great pleasure to introduce today’s fantastic guest writer: Tom Kerwin. The newsletter is, as always, split in such a way that the main text is available for everyone, with additional practical takeaways available to premium subscribers below the paywall. Let us get into it.
The problem with backcasting
From a popular definition of insanity to a popular Disney movie
I'm going to tell you a story as old as time itself.
Actually, maybe it's more of a story as old as 1980s corporate strategy, so I guess it's a story in its mid-40s.
Either way, it’s a story of sticking with “the way we do strategy round here” even when it isn’t working for us any longer. It goes like this.
In a strategy session — often at an inspiring off-site with excellent catering — the leadership agrees on a juicy vision, affirms that change is needed, and commits to doing their bit. The strategy is then worked up into a gorgeous deck and shared in a ‘town hall’ meeting, with the vibe of a TED talk.
There’s much excitement and fist bumping. But then, over the following months, neither the changes nor the vision really materialise. People start grumbling: we just need to put in more effort! Make tough choices! Fight the inertia! People need to step up, dammit!
And so, in the following quarter's off-site, the leadership agrees to shake things up. They make the vision even shinier, get even more aggressive about what needs to change, and demand even more commitment from the teams. More specifics! More updates! More accountability!
When faced with a failing strategy, they strategize even harder.
Does this story have a happy ending?
No, not usually.
And it’s strange. In our personal lives, this “if it’s not working, do it more and harder” approach would be recognised as daft. Someone would quip about “doing the same thing and expecting different results”.
For example, say I tell you I’m finally going to get in shape. I set myself a SMART goal to lose 15lbs by August and I commit to changing what I eat and doing some exercise. You already know that within days I will have slipped back into my old patterns. The effects of my willpower will be short lived at best.
When it comes to personal change, many authors and coaches are now clear that willpower alone rarely works. Instead, they encourage us to change our environment in ways that make desirable behaviours easier, while adding friction to undesirable ones. They invite us to experiment with different tiny new habits. And they expect us to adapt as we observe how we respond to our experiments.
So how come everyone forgets all of that when they step through the office door? Many companies seem trapped in a backcasting-based approach that rhymes with the willpower method for getting in shape.
For those unfamiliar with the term, backcasting was coined by John B Robinson in 1982. It describes any method where you establish the description of a very definite and specific future situation and then make a plan to get there from the present. You’ll recognise this in the story we started out with. It’s ubiquitous in corporate strategy.
The sting in the tail is that when backcasting fails (and it increasingly does) folks grow frustrated, lose trust in themselves, and fall prey to snake oil salespeople who promise a quick fix; one weird trick to obliterate stubborn belly fat next quarter’s targets!
I suspect there are lots of factors that keep organisations backcasting, but I’ll focus on a few:
Factor 1: Backcasting can work - in certain situations
Backcasting became popular because it really is the best approach sometimes. There’s a subset of tractable cause-and-effect situations when vision-plan-do is effective – I’m thinking especially of engineering puzzles and double-diamond-type design problems. In the ordered domain in the Cynefin framework, things are predictable enough that we can make this kind of plan.
But many challenges facing organisations today are too complex to be amenable to backcasting. And when it doesn’t work it really goes down in flames. Unfortunately, when people have experienced success with such an approach before, it’s very hard to let go – even when it’s not working any more. Doubly so if the alternatives feel unfamiliar or weird.
Factor 2: Retrospective coherence
Backcasting looks like it works better than it truly does due to retrospective coherence. In business, happy accidents are frequently recast as if they were always part of the plan.
Imagine you were to take two walking trips. You plan the first on a map then use a compass to follow the planned route perfectly. The second trip you improvise on the day, recording your route on a map as you go. By the end of the day, both maps look equally as if they had been planned in advance.
Similarly, it’s easy to look back over a chaotic, improvised initiative and imagine you planned it – or at least that you could have if you’d only tried hard enough. And so you keeping trying.
Factor 3: what else are you gonna do?
There isn’t a popular alternative (yet!). As JP has covered in various editions of this very newsletter, almost all business strategy either follows the backcasting approach or exists in structured opposition to it but doesn’t question its fundamental problem-solving premise.
In many businesses, it can be difficult to bring in new approaches until they’re having their moment as the new hotness.
And so
All of the above leaves us in a bit of a bind. What are we supposed to do about this? What should we be doing?
Firstly, don’t focus on the end goal of getting your strategic approach perfect. That’s just more backcasting from a vision. Instead, heed the words of Arthur Ashe: “Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.”
This is why I’m so excited by recent developments like Dave Snowden’s Estuarine Framework and Jabe Bloom’s Ideal Present, along with the ideas and methods I’ve captured in my Innovation Tactics deck.
All these developments help open the door to what’s becoming known (a little tongue-in-cheek) as the ‘Frozen 2’ approach to strategy: simply do the next right thing.
Broadly speaking, this means you’ll focus on getting clear about how you perceive the current situation, instead of establishing a future vision. Then you’ll manage the constraints acting on your situation today, so that things you would like to have happen become more likely to happen.
It’s about conditions and their consequences. Instead of assuming that everything can be treated as linear cause and effect — striving to control the uncontrollable — you look to influence the evolutionary potential of the present.
At first glance, what I’m describing might sound strange or frustratingly oblique. You might be thinking yourself: “Without a vision, how will we get aligned? What the hell does he mean by constraints or evolutionary potential? This all sounds like going broad when we need to focus. Without a clear plan, how will people be held accountable?”
I understand your concerns. However, as I mentioned, the good news is that you can try out the Frozen 2 approach in small, safe ways – without throwing anything you currently do in the bin (and often without even needing buy-in from colleagues). And for premium subscribers, I will now explain how.
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