By 2050, will your organisation exist? Are you sowing the seeds of its demise today? The US Coast Guard faced this question and didn’t flinch. Instead, it crafted a 25-year perspective that changed the way it understands current challenges.
While you can’t predict the future, by 2050, your organisation will likely face existential demands. The Coast Guard’s Project Evergreen showed that “we need the perspective from 25 years in the future to truly understand today’s issues”.
However, they began by failing. The project delivered 15 years of detailed plans that fell apart as soon as they hit the inboxes of those who were supposed to implement them. They discovered that they were repeatedly asking the wrong question.
They needed to make a dramatic shift. To ask a different question.
The Wrong Question for 15 Years
Picture the scene: sophisticated scenario planning workshops, brilliant forecasters mapping 25-year futures, teams developing strategies for emerging Arctic missions, underwater operations, and evolving maritime threats. The analysis was prescient. Then it hit organisational reality.
Every time Project Evergreen delivered strategic plans, they landed “like most additional work at an office with an already full plate: dead on arrival”.
The Coast Guard had tried to be mechanical. Consequently, their strategies became “isolated, independent cogs” requiring “considerable effort to forcefully engage into the many turning mechanisms” of organisational planning. Imagine trying to jam a rigid gear into a running machine – that’s what implementing these strategies felt like.
Why?
The question they asked for 15 years seemed perfectly reasonable: “What should the Coast Guard do?”
Sounds familiar? It’s the opening question in every strategic planning session across Jamaica. What should our organisation do about AI? And digital transformation?
Here’s why it fails.
That question generates prescriptive solutions from workshop participants who won’t implement them. As the Coast Guard discovered, “the ideal people to do the job might not be in the room”.
This creates supply side thinking: strategists pushing solutions onto implementers which are disconnected from reality.
The flaw doesn’t lie in the fact that strategists are separated from implementers. There are too many of the latter to include in a retreat.
It’s the question orientation
Invisibly, the typical question reinforces a “present forward” mindset. Asking “What should we do?” is fine for everyday problem solving – analysing today’s issues, extrapolating current trends, prescribing solutions. Perfect for quarterly targets. Fatal for 25-year transformation.
While it’s used every day, it blocks great corporate strategy.
After 15 years, the Coast Guard discovered the shift required to future back thinking (Johnson and Suskewicz).
This new mindset led them to ask a different question: “What demands will the organisation face?”
This isn’t semantic wordplay. It’s a complete cognitive reorientation. Instead of starting with today’s problems and projecting forward, you start with 2050’s demands and work backward.
When the Coast Guard made this shift, they began to identify what they call “robust strategic needs”. They’re outcomes driven by specific long-term futures, each requiring particular strategies.
The difference: prescriptions constrain implementers. Strategic needs empower them to craft solutions matched to evolving reality.
What Future Back Looks Like
Here’s what future back thinking looks like in practice.
Project Evergreen workshops now map 2050 scenarios across multiple plausible futures. Then something critical happened: “The solution space had to be left to the people who were actually going to implement the solution.” Implementers were asked to meet strategic needs and “deconstruct and then reconstruct” them for their specific contexts.
This works because game-changing objectives spanning 25 years can’t be prescribed – they require flexible frameworks that adapt as the future unfolds. Strategic needs provide that framework. Rigid tactics don’t. The result: Evergreen became a “backdoor strategic contributor” that guides without constraining. But there’s more. This approach looks to 2050 to produce a payoff in 2025. Future back thinking reveals which current “urgent” priorities are superfluous.
How?
When the demands of the future are clear, some problems disappear in the larger scheme of things.
It also provides implementers the flexibility needed to inspire themselves. Consider a proposed Vision 2050 Jamaica through this lens. Present forward asks: “What should Jamaica do about immediate problems?” This generates aspirations such as “developed country status”, which are disconnected from implementation reality.
Future back asks: “What demands will Jamaica face in 2050?” This identifies strategic needs, such as hurricane resiliency, that ministries must customise for their contexts – flexible frameworks instead of rigid mandates.
The immediate advantage: you stop wasting 2025 resources on solutions that don’t address long-term demands. Understanding today’s issues requires tomorrow’s perspective.
Source Cited: Project Evergreen’s Long-Range Strategic Planning, United States Naval Institute.
Francis Wade is the author of ‘Perfect Time-Based Productivity’, a keynote speaker and a management consultant. To search his prior columns on productivity, strategy, engagement and business processes, send email to columns@fwconsulting.com
