Looking backwards, moving forward

The Doomsday Clock is set every year by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, an organization founded in 1945 by Albert Einstein and the group of scientists who helped develop the first atomic weapons in the Manhattan Project. Updated every year by the Bulletin’s Science and Security Board, the Clock has become a universally recognized indicator of the world’s vulnerability to catastrophe from nuclear weapons, climate change, and disruptive technologies in other domains. In their annual letter issued in late January to the ”leaders and citizens of the world”, the Board has set the clock for 2022 at 100 seconds to midnight, citing causes from the nuclear tightrope, climate change, intentional or accidental biological threats, and the role of technology in the age of misinformation. For the past two years, the Clock has been closer to midnight than ever in its history.

Beyond the specific causes of each category of threats - with nuclear warfare recently burgeoned back at the top of our collective minds in the Ukrainian conflict - one interesting observation is that the Board has cited widespread evidence of inaction as a common root cause forcing us to remain stuck in a perilous moment, one that brings neither stability nor security. Arguably, we live in a world dominated by capitalism, a world where success equals to business success, and is a direct function of a leader’s ability to make decision, quickly and right. And yet, all the most sever existential threats are caused by our collective inability to make decisions for our own good. Quite ironic.

Decisions are the outcome of complex mechanisms that usually involves two different kinds of thinking: looking backwards, to understand the past, and looking forward, to predict the future. According to Hillel J. Einhorn?and?Robin M. Hogarth, thinking backward is largely intuitive and suggestive; it tends to be diagnostic and requires judgment. It involves looking for patterns, making links between seemingly unconnected events, testing possible chains of causation to explain an event, and finding a metaphor or a theory to help in looking forward.

Thinking forward is different. Instead of intuition, it depends on a kind of mathematical formulation: the decision maker must assemble and weigh a number of variables and then make a prediction. Using a strategy or a rule, assessing the accuracy of each factor, and combining all the pieces of information, the decision maker arrives at a single, integrated forecast.

In our everyday experience we can find hundreds of examples of thinking backward and thinking forward: we constantly leverage both approaches of reasoning, separately and together, and we are constantly confounded in our efforts.

Quoting Italo Calvino, we can succeed only if we are able to “bind together the imprint of the past and the project of the future, as it enables us to act without forgetting what we wanted to do, to become without ceasing to be, and to be without ceasing to become”.

While explicit rules or models are the best tools to use for reasoning forward, intuition or notions of cause can often exert a powerful influence on the predictions we make.

There is an approach called "working backwards" that is widely used at Amazon. Developing its products, offering, and technology, the company tries to work backwards from the customer, rather than starting with an idea and then try to bolt a strategy onto it.

For new initiatives, an Amazon product manager typically starts by writing an internal press release announcing the finished product. The target audience for the press release is the new or updated product's customers or offering recipients. Internal press releases are centered around the customer problem, how current solutions (internal or external) fail, and how the new product will blow away existing solutions. If the benefits listed don't sound very interesting or exciting to customers, then perhaps they're not, and whole new initiative should not be pursued. Instead, the product manager should keep iterating on the press release until they've come up with benefits that actually sound like benefits.

The working backwards approach is supported by the idea of customer centrism, one of Amazon’s guiding principles: Amazon’s strategy is to start with a focus on the customer, and then figure out what products to build to delight that customer. Using the working backwards method fits perfectly with Amazon’s customer-centric approach. The product team needs to think through all of the reasons it built the hypothetical product, so it can draft a compelling news release to announce the product’s release in a way that would convince the target customer to run out and buy it.

Are there learnings here for public officials to help address today's short-term pressing needs while preparing for tomorrow's impacts and surprises?

Uncertainty is not new in decision-making processes. Societies have historically managed probabilities and scenarios when building new infrastructure, managing energy supplies, and investing in new technologies and markets, among other areas. Leaders and governments all around the world now face the challenge of accounting for a new source of uncertainty: that related to the impacts of new threats and of the outcomes of the strategies proposed to adapt to them. should prioritize the consolidation of social and institutional frameworks that allow for continuous adaptation to the impacts of climate change and new socio-economic scenarios.

This calls for strong political and social leadership, characterized by an ability to learn from the past and the present, and by a true commitment to the future. The crisis the world is currently facing should be seen as a unique opportunity to set the foundations for resilient, fair and adaptive societies. Cooperation, proactivity, good governance and social participation will be key in the process. All without forgetting past successes and mistakes, in a continuous effort to learn from the past to inform future decisions. They say that we shouldn’t look back because that’s not where we’re going, but maybe it’s best to look backwards every now and again to remember where we are coming from.