By Karl Schroeder
We’re faced with a “polycrisis,” individually and collectively.
We have to chart a path through an increasingly complex, unpredictable world. Over the years the foresight community has developed many techniques for doing this; one of these, backcasting, is a standard part of the foresight toolkit. Probably used earlier but first described by John B. Robinson in 1982, it’s a way of reframing strategic plans that individuals, companies, and governments can use.
Backcasting is easy to describe: you begin at the end and work your way back step by step to now — the beginning. You want to do this because in trying to plan, we often end up with a big impossible list of all the sub-problems we have to solve on the way to our goal. Where to start? They all present themselves simultaneously; how do we come up with a plan that simultaneously tackles all of them?
The tool’s power derives from its requirement that you reframe your problem. There is a subtlety to it that I haven’t heard discussed, though: it retains the notion of linear time in this reframing operation. You usually backcast because you are looking for a linear series of steps you can follow, and the process turns the order around.
Doing this imposes its own constraint on the process, though. It’s sometimes useful to backcast atemporally — to abandon the idea of linear time as you do it. Doing this can clarify the steps even further than reversing the order can do by itself.
Let’s look at two kinds of polycrisis as examples, and show how an atemporal backcast makes each easier to manage.
TWO POLYCRISES
Two highly complex planning problems — one global in scope and one close to home:
How do you achieve your own goals, becoming the person you want to be? Let’s say, over the next ten years?
How can we steer global societies away from the encroaching dystopia of semi-authoritarianism — anocracy — and toward a renewed democracy?
If you or your team start from now and ask what’s the first step I should take? the result can be brainlock. It’s a situation very similar to writer’s block: the harder you think about it or brainstorm the possibilities, the more blocked you become. It’s easy to end up throwing up your hands and concluding that planning something like this is impossible.
Backcasting asks you to start by defining the end goal you want, and your deadline. You carefully describe how that future situation (or that future you) is different from the present. Then you ask what necessary actions immediately precede that endpoint. If your goal is to be a rock star in ten years, what do you need to be doing a year before you break out? Where are you, who are you with, what’s your immediate plan at that time?
Having defined the situation and actions being taken at that preceding moment, you take another step backwards, and again ask what kind of circumstances, choices or actions make that moment possible. Rinse and repeat, in a manageable set of small increments, back to the present.
You can backcast from some specific ideal scenario, or from some set of principles you want to get to. In theory, it’s easy. In practice, it’s not.
PITFALLS OF WALKING BACKWARD
I’ve facilitated backcasting exercises in foresight conference breakout sessions. It’s usually a recipe for chaos. Your group will commit sins including, but not limited to describing the end-state as if it’s always existed; disagreeing on what success even means; using the same words to mean entirely different things; making logical leaps over one or more steps (this year we’re conspiring in a beer hall and next year, we seize power!), and so on. The end result can be like herding cats.
This is where the strategic use of creative constraints comes in handy. You can constrain your problem space by defining the end point carefully, or by restricting what counts as a description of any step.
Take the example of personal growth over the next decade. You might start by listing all the things you want to accomplish in the next ten years, or by describing in detail the person you’d like to be. These are good endpoints. But then you face the same situation you’re trying to avoid — you’ve got too many possible preceding options. Not knowing which preceding choice is the right one is the same as not knowing which next step to take now. You’re no further ahead.
NPCs TO THE RESCUE
One solution can be to stop thinking about the problem in terms of an ordered sequence of events. Instead, backcasting can be an exercise in describing the pure difference between your starting and end states. This sounds highly abstract, but actually it’s straightforward.
For example, if you’ve ever played a role-playing game (such as Dungeons & Dragons) you’ll be familiar with the idea of rolling a character. If you’ve been a gamemaster, you’ll have created Non-Player Characters (NPCs). In both cases, you’re defining a persona with distinct qualities. You might want to play a rogue or thief, so you create a backstory and roll or select the qualities of the player character, such as an ability to improvise under pressure, fast-talk their way out of trouble, have nimble fingers, be a good gymnast etc. This is standard practice when role-playing.
Sometimes people use the character-design rules of some game system to describe themselves. It’s an interesting exercise and can help you expose your strengths and weaknesses with more honesty than other techniques, because you do it by distancing yourself slightly from yourself. You as someone else are easier to work with than you as you.
Even if you’re not a gamer, there’s a clue here to a technique for backcasting your own future. It starts with describing a person you would admire and aspire to be like. You don’t start by describing yourself, and that’s the point: you describe the admirable qualities of someone else. (Not a real person, note — a made-up one.)
BACKCASTING YOUR SELF
However you want to describe that person, make sure you list the specific behaviors, habits, ways of reacting to shocks and surprises, etc. that enable them to be successful and admirable. You might also list particular things they have done and milestones they’ve accomplished in their lives such as marriage, financial success, and professional accomplishments.
This is your future self, but it’s not necessarily useful to think of the target that way. The list of characteristics they have that you don’t have might seem overwhelming if you do that; it could be impossible to think of yourself becoming them.
Instead, roll up a second character similar to the first but who lacks one or two of its accomplishments. This persona has a quirk or two of yours or is in a circumstance a little more like your own. The exercise is to fully flesh out this person, thinking about their strengths and flaws and how they cope with life as a fully rounded human being in their own right.
After doing this, ask what they could be doing, from that grounded beginning, to achieve the one or two things that your previously defined ideal person has. Are they in college, heading for a degree? Are they pregnant? Are they working to serve some community? Whatever they’re up to, the aim is to understand what kind of person this second character is and what makes it possible that they might, one day, become as accomplished as the first.
Now, create a third character based on the second, doing the same replacement/subtractive exercise. This person resembles you a little more but is also more accomplished. Once again, fully flesh them out: how do they function? What enables them to work under pressure? What supports do they have? How did they get them?
Repeat this process several more times, crafting a series of personas that become closer and closer to who you are now. This works because each of these people is in a stable situation but also on a clearly defined path to becoming the next one.
If you’ve done the exercise diligently, you should end up with a description of yourself, as you are now, with maybe just one thing you want to accomplish or change about yourself in the next year. That one change doesn’t magically turn you into the person you want to be. But it puts you on a road that you now understand, where each milepost is visible and achievable from the one before it.
This is backcasting, but without the usual framing of describing changes happening in linear time. Instead, the difference between now and then is turned into a difference between you as you are, and someone nearly like you. Thinking about time geometrically (as a line or 4th dimension) has its uses, but it can block your thinking, too. In this case, by turning ‘future’ selves into different people (maybe living right now) you can avoid some of the ‘what’s next’ pitfalls in planning.
Now let’s look at backcasting to save democracy and freedom for the next generation.
THE BEGINNING
We’ll start with where we are now — stuck in a world where the public is increasingly disenchanted with democracy but where, generally, totalitarianism isn’t acceptable.
In its place, we have a spreading cancer of semi-authoritarian states: countries with the trappings of democracy, such as regular elections and multiple political parties, but where the outcome of any vote is rigged in favour of a ruling elite. This elite, which in the USA includes a couple of billionaires and tenacious politicians I won’t bother to name, is spreading the lie that anocracy has always been the ugly truth hiding behind the facade of freedom in constitutional democracies. Their propaganda says that we have never really been democratic, so why keep pretending?
Examples of modern anocracies include Egypt, Hungary, Russia, and Turkey. Poland has been flirting with it but has, for now, backed off from the previous government’s takeover of the judicial system. India is trending that way with Hindu Nationalism, as is the United States with MAGA.
How do we escape from this cynical, disintegrating social contract? The question presents itself as the classic problematique — what these days we call a “polycrisis.” It’s nearly impossible to figure out where to start in dealing with it. In such a situation, even backcasting can fail because the options at each step are so numerous and complex. So, let’s not start at the end, in a framing of literal time, but rather laterally--with Utopia.
THE PERFECT WORLD
Imagine a global governance that has successfully suppressed anocracy. In this aspirational world, most nations enjoy a stable, inclusive, and democratic government. These improvements are driven by:
Responsive institutions that ensure the transparency, accountability, and independence of counter-balancing branches of government.
A regulatory “immune system” that defends against anti-democratic technologies such as divisive social media.
Mutual dependence in the face of climate change and environmental degradation. This encourages the growth of a network of plurinational states, which recognize the internal diversity of clans, tribes, and even the nonhuman stakeholders that support them.
The use of use AI and advanced technologies to enhance democratic decision-making. AI is used as an enabler, facilitating informed decision-making.
A free press that in most countries is at least partially publicly funded and buttressed by strong anti-monopoly laws.
Virtual nations and AI-assisted polities that make plurinational citizenship easy for people to practice. These arrangements make obsolete the traditional, unitary Westfalian state.
Reformed tax systems that mitigate the concentration of wealth.
Advanced, “post-market” methods for allocating resources, which people use to create economic arrangements that the political right can’t label as “communism,” but which are definitely not capitalistic.
A reformed educational system, free for all.
SIMPLIFYING THE PROBLEM SPACE
Because this is an exercise in cutting through entangled complexities, I’ll use a modern approach to Gordian Knots: Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety. This law says that you have two options if you want to control a system (say, a country): you can increase the internal diversity of your governing structure to match the complexity of what you’re trying to govern (for instance by recognizing and representing all its constituents) or you can decrease the complexity of what you’re trying to govern, to match your own system’s structure. (For instance, by repealing same-sex marriage, declaring there to be only two genders, and writing your laws accordingly.)
Simplifying isn’t always bad, nor does it always involve eliminating the actual complexity of the world — for instance, supermarkets simplify the otherwise overwhelming choice of products by arranging them in labeled aisles. The LGBTQ+ community is currently engaged in labeling its aisles, and hopefully, once this is done society as a whole will have a vocabulary that it can use to navigate the complexities of gender without eliminating its actual complexity.
For this exercise, I’ve already done such a simplification, by breaking out nine features of my aspirational Utopia. Tackling each separately is intuitively easier than trying to push forward on all fronts, just as looking for spaghetti sauce is easier when you know where the pasta aisle is. Ashby’s Law can help us understand where we stand, and further reduce the complexity of our backcast operation. Here’s how:
Let’s say that the current movement to semi-authoritarianism is partly due to decision fatigue. People have reached the personal limit of how much they can increase their internal complexity to match the complexity of the world. Events such as Covid just add to our exhaustion. Having maxed out Ashby’s first strategy, we are left with the second: simplify the world.
In this situation, voting for an oligarch who is going to dismantle our rights and freedoms (for example, abortion rights) becomes preferable to learning new rules of etiquette to deal with increasingly finely carved social sets. If we no longer understand how governance is happening (even if it’s being done right), it’s preferable, for some of us, to let a tyrant rule because then at least we know where we stand. For some of us, decision fatigue and cognitive overload are worse prospects than restrictions on our rights and the denial of historic and othered identities.
This gives us a second way to simplify our backcast, by performing what Ian Bogost calls a Unit Operation on each of our nine aspirations. For each one, we’ll ask the same question:
How can we make (democratic system x) easier for people than accepting anocracy?
HOPPING LATERALLY FROM UTOPIA
Now we can start with our ninefold democratic state, and work sideways by subtracting its qualities. Only eight of our factors will be widespread in a world adjacent to the Utopia; only six next to that one, and so on. In each case, the question is what about the current state makes moving to the one beside it easier for people than staying with their own?
I tried this backcast while writing this article, but in doing so I found there seemed to be no single necessary sequence of changes that led from our current state to the target. There were other ways to arrange the sequence. When you backcast atemporally, the desired state (in this case our Utopia) can stop looking like the end-point of a series of events, and more like the center of a radiating set of possible differences. Diagramming this, you end up with something that resembles Jerome Glenn’s Futures Wheel more than a linear chart.
Drawing such a diagram for this backcast (or should we now be calling it a sidecast?) would have been fun but would have taken a lot of time and energy. Instead I’ll describe one possible throughline, with the understanding that this exact sequence isn’t the only possible way to get from here to Utopia.
Here’s one way to win against semi-authoritarianism. This sequence comes from picking a series of adjacent states. For clarity, I’ll work forward from now:
Regulations are placed on social media (initially by the EU) to break up and eventually ban the ‘engagement-driven’ social media that profit directly from the rage-clicks of their users. Some governments directly fund the Fediverse and others give it tax incentives.
The aim is to reverse the widening gulf between people shouting past each other on the Internet, by turning community-busting algorithms into community-building ones. These changes can be as simple as the open-source social media system Mastodon’s refusing to allow repost comments; by only allowing a straight repost of the original, it deliberately suppresses rage-inducing clickbait while not prohibiting free expression. As these practices become widespread (Mastodon alone had 15 million users in March 2024) doomscrolling and unfocused rage are reduced, and reposting is weighted in favour of factual reports rather than clickbait.
New funding mechanisms are found for basic and advanced schooling. Free universities are established where possible. In some countries, people are acknowledged to have a right to a full education.
Governments and nonprofits push back against media consolidation by funding a vast, mobilized army of journalists. These reporters, many of whom are citizen journalists, use trustless technologies and bias detection to rebuild peoples’ confidence in the news they hear.
After nearly being bankrupted by the transfer of trillions of dollars into private hands during and after Covid, governments strike back by, firstly, demanding that money maintain its velocity — that the newly privatized trillions are not just banked but are reinvested — and begin closing loopholes and negative incentives such as stock buy-backs. The principle that businesses are ultimately responsible to their shareholders alone is contested in the public sphere, and legislation gives preferential status to B-corps and other private entities that also serve the public good. Private donations to political campaigns are limited. Finally, progressive wealth taxes are reintroduced similar to those that were in effect in the U.S. during the 1950s.
Countries band together to rebuild trust in institutions both at home and internationally. For anocracies, succession is their weak spot. Since they are ruled by small elites, when the current despot or figurehead politician dies, there is always instability while the elites battle it out for control. The tightening resource restrictions caused by climate change make it increasingly difficult to steal wealth from the people; the elites are more embattled. People are starving under semi-authoritarian rule. Nations that break free of elite theft no longer advertise the value of democracy as symbolized by voting, because everybody votes, even the citizens of anocracies — but instead promote transparency, separation of powers, and the rule of law as the strategic path to democratic reform.
Led by states such as Chile, countries adopt new constitutions that recognize the rights of nature, indigenous rights, and equal rights for women. While semi-authoritarian governments are in power this kind of reform is impossible, and some anocracies are very stable. The instant an anocratic government falters, however, democratic councils emerge that propose new constitutional orders, as happened in Spain after Franco and Chile after Pinochet. Doing this allows these countries to enter a club of mutually interdependent states that share regional-level public projects that wouldn’t benefit the old elites but are essential for people to live in the new hothouse world.
By the time anocracy has begun to exhaust itself, decentralized finance has been around for almost half a century, and the monolithic technofeudal economics of Amazon and the other technology companies for even longer. There are no free-market fundamentalists left because everybody knows we don’t live in a market economy any longer and haven’t for a long time. While it is a major power, technofeudalism hasn’t triumphed everywhere the way neoliberalism did before it; the Global South has been building a circular economy for decades and doughnut economics and decentralized-planned economies are also coming into vogue. Therefore, no one is surprised when the UN declares that the world has entered a post-capitalist era.
After society acquires enough experience working with AI, people become comfortable incorporating it into governance. Modern AI has to have all the reforms that people have fought for transparently, provably built into it this to work. AI could become just one more control system for the oligarchs. It’s easier for AI to acquire accurate data and enact strategies in a transparent world where trust is prevalent.
Virtual nations recognize that people have lived in a globally networked, plurinational world for generations. Instant seamless translation, trade- and policy-blocs such as the EU, and shared virtual spaces where people congregate based on interests and values rather than geography and background, multiply people’s political identities. There are fewer reasons to identify oneself with a single nationality. Formally recognizing this via a system of representation for virtual stakeholders is easier than trying to deny half of one’s identity.
To sum up, I did not set out to create a time order so much as a logical order showing how each step makes the next one easier for people to buy into. Accepting that, in this list we do have to push at least the first five of these right now. It’s possible to imagine events such as #1 and #2 happening in the next few years; these, in turn, would make it possible to imagine a public discourse about the merits of, e.g., tax breaks for the ultra-wealthy. Even countries fully captured by oligarchic elites are going to find it hard to justify wealth capture when the real economy has less and less investment. Once there is literally nothing left to steal from the people, the house of cards collapses.
This model is obviously biased by my personal politics and (some would say) naivete. One controversial element I could have included in the sidecast is a Univeral Basic Income, which might nestle next to #4. It would probably manifest as an attempted sop by the embattled billionaire class — a way of pacifying the people whose wealth and property they’ve appropriated, with at least a tolerable lowest poverty level. UBI imposed in such a cynical way could backfire, however, when hundreds of millions of educated citizens with time on their hands and access to AI start redesigning economics out from under the elites.
This is exactly what happens in my novel Stealing Worlds. I mention that because most of the above changes have to happen simultaneously, but it’s nearly impossible to describe such a transformation. You can do it, by deploying narrative as your tool. Humans seem to have evolved storytelling specifically to be able to think and talk about complex adaptive systems such as people, societies, and ecosystems. You could “windtunnel” all of the above ideas by trying to tell a believable story that uses all of them. Believability is the key; it signals acceptance by deep cognitive processes we don’t have direct conscious access to.
I’ll leave you with that as an exercise. Do your own multi-sided backcast and imagine a story where all its transformations happen simultaneously. Can you find a single plot and characters that you can fit all the ideas into? What are the blockers that prevent it from making sense to you—continued corporate control of media? Sinister conspiracies that already control the world? See what you can find.
Regardless of whether you believe the framing of this specific backcast, I hope I’ve convinced you that backcasting is more flexible than we usually expect. It’s usually —but not always — concerned with linear time, but there are other options, and they can be fruitful and fun to explore.
Note: A version of this article first appeared in the author’s substack publication, Unapocalyptic, as “Planning Backwards” at https://kschroeder.substack.com/p/planning-backwards.
Karl Schroeder is the author of 10 science fiction novels and dozens of short stories. In 2002 he was invited to participate in a foresight workshop hosted by Jack Smith in Ottawa and began contributing to foresight projects. In 2011, he was part of the first cohort to receive a Master’s degree in Strategic Foresight and Innovation from OCAD University. He continues to write science fiction and design fictions as part of his speculative design practice. Karl lives in Toronto, Canada, with his wife and daughter.
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