From Impossible to Inevitable
Backcasting the Future: The Lost Art of Long-Term Vision in a Short-Term World
While flipping through the wonderful (and wonderfully produced) book “Make Something Wonderful – Steve Jobs in His Own Words” (available as a free download on the Steve Jobs Archive – highly recommended), I came across this quote from Jobs:
Now, Apple’s strategy is really simple. What we want to do is put an incredibly great computer in a book that you carry around with you, that you can learn how to use in twenty minutes. That’s what we want to do. And we want to do it this decade. And we really want to do it with a radio link in it so you don’t have to hook up to anything—you’re in communication with all these larger databases and other computers. We don’t know how to do that now. It’s impossible technically.
He said this in his speech at the International Design Conference in Aspen on June 15, 1983—a year before he introduced the Macintosh and a mere five months after Apple launched the Lisa (here is a video of the speech—also highly recommended).
What Jobs describes here is, of course, the iPad—which didn’t launch until 27 years later. It shows Jobs’ willingness to commit to a long-term vision—and have the patience to see it through. Now, Jobs didn’t dream up the concept for a tablet-like computer—that accolade goes to Alan Kay, who—while working at Xerox PARC (the same place Jobs saw and then got inspired by the graphical user interface)—developed the Dynabook concept in 1972 (another 11 years before Jobs made the comment above).
Much can be said and lamented about the fact that few, if any, (large) companies are even willing to think that far out (and markets tend to not reward this kind of thinking anymore), but there is something to be learned from Jobs’ future-forward thinking and leadership style. See, when you look at Jobs’ prediction as the end of a developing exponential tech trend—in the case of the Dynabook/iPad, it’s all predicated on Moore’s Law (which was formulated in 1965—i.e., it predates Kay’s Dynabook by seven years)—and work backwards (what people in the futurist/forecasting community refer to as “backcasting”), you can see a fairly clear picture emerge. And what seemed “impossible” suddenly becomes not only possible, but a pathway toward possibility emerges.
And it is not just Jobs’ iPad – decades later, Elon Musk used the same approach to create his vision for colonizing Mars: he started out with a bold, ambitious, and, at the time, impossible vision of establishing a human habitat on Mars. Working to the midway point, you get to something like “cheap, safe, and prolonged launches into space” – which gives you, as you work backward from there, the plan to execute for his SpaceX venture.
Working backward from “an incredibly great computer in a book that you carry around with you, that you can learn how to use in twenty minutes” on an exponential curve toward the midway point, you realize that the midway point isn’t that far off from where you are today—in Jobs’ case, it might have been something like “a compact desktop computer running an easy-to-use graphical user interface” (aka the Macintosh). Once you have established this point, you can then work further backward and explore what you need to build to get to this point (again, taking Jobs as an example, he needed to take the Lisa, make it more compact, bring the price down, and give it more power). With this in mind, you can now get working—and the crazy, far-off, “impossible” future stops looking quite as impossible anymore.
Here is a simple framework to apply backcasting to your vision:
Envision your “impossible” end goal (with a timeline of 10+ years)
Identify the necessary technological/market conditions for success
Determine your “halfway point” milestone
Map the concrete steps to reach that midpoint
Begin immediate execution on step 1
I believe one of the great malaises of today’s world is that we, by and large, have lost our willingness to think and act long-term. I also believe it comes, to a certain degree, from our perceived inability to figure out how to get from what we have today to the far-off future state. Applying a little bit of bold, audacious future thinking, working backward from there to identify the midway point, and then defining and working on the steps that get us to that midway point might very well be what is needed in today’s environment of heightened uncertainty and ambiguity.
The path from “impossible” to “inevitable” is rarely straight, but it becomes navigable when broken into strategic milestones. Jobs didn’t just dream of the iPad—he built the Mac, then the iPod, then the iPhone, creating stepping stones toward his ultimate vision. What impossible future are you willing to commit to today? As Nobel-prize winning scientist Dennis Gabor reminds us, “The future cannot be predicted, but futures can be invented.” The only question is: which future will you choose to invent?
@Pascal