Simply stated: start with the end in mind. Take your desired goal or outcome and work backwards to identify the steps that get you to that outcome.
Working backwards is one of the most useful and powerful mental models. It takes away uncertainty and anxiety: you no longer wonder if and how you can reach your goal because you’ve identified a path that gets you there. It reduces frustration by forcing you to focus on actions that lead to the desired outcome, instead of wasting time and energy on fruitless activities. It gives you confidence that you’re on the right track and it makes it easier to ‘trust the process.’
Working backwards and inversion use a similar, but slightly different, approach and work well together. Working backwards forces you to think from your desired future back to the present. Inversion, instead, forces you to turn your desirable outcome into your undesirable outcome(s) and how it can be avoided. Paired together, these mental models give you plenty of ideas (steps) and pathways to get you to your goal, while avoiding worst-case scenarios.
Working backwards helps you in 4 ways:
- Starting with the end in mind forces you to imagine your desired outcome. Once imagined, you cannot unsee your (imagined) success and belief and confidence that it’s achievable increases.
- Working backwards helps you identify different paths to achieve your desired result. From there, you can figure out which path is the easiest, fastest and/or most likely to yield result given your strengths (circle of competence), assets and circumstances.
- It forces you to focus on only those activities that get you to your goal. This leads to improved effectiveness and reduced waste.
- Working backwards can be paired with First Principles Thinking to rethink a problem from the ground up: what is your desired outcome and how can you get there. This stimulates creativity and often leads to innovative and faster/better/cheaper solutions.
To make working backwards more vivid, imagine training to do a pull-up for the first time. You probably try to pull yourself up and fail, realizing you don’t have enough strength. But if you cannot do even one pull-up, how can you train to get the necessary strength?
Of course, you can use a resistance band, weights or jump off the ground to make the initial pull-up motion require less strength and thus easier, but an alternative way is by doing the motion backwards. In physical exericse this is called negative training or a negative repetition, whereby you only do the down or muscle-lengthening (eccentric movement) part of the exercise (often making use of gravity), making the entire exercise easier.
In the case of our pull-up exercise, we can stand on a chair to get ourselves to the highest part of the pull-up, lift our feet off the chair and slowly lower ourselves down. Doing simply this down movement and increasing the reps will over time give you the strength needed to do a proper pull-up (without using a chair).
We’ve made the pull-up exercise easier and require less strength by starting at the end (in the pull-up position) and working backwards (lowering ourselves down). Thinking backwards can achieve this same result (doing your first pull-up) for practically any goal or outcome you desire.
How to use Working Backwards
In business, a simple implementation of working backwards are sales targets.
Imagine, needing to earn $1,000,000 revenue this year as a salesperson (a realtor for example). Our first question is: how can we achieve this?
Working backwards we know that 1 client paying us $1,000,000 or 1,000,000 clients paying us $1 (or anything in between) will get us there. From experience we know that in our business each new client earns us about $1,000 in annual revenue. In that case, the math is simple: to earn $1,000,000, we need to get 1000 clients this year (1000 x $1,000 = $1,000,000).
Continuing to work backwards, we ask ourselves: how can we get 1000 clients?
Multiple ways come to mind: we can cold call, we can run online ads, we can use social media, we can advertise locally, we can partner with someone, we can run a group seminar…you get the gist.
Doing all of them is possible, but it makes more sense to figure out which one suits your skills, assets and circumstances the best. Considering the conversion rates of each method (doing the activity -> getting a new client) and how much time and effort each method takes you, you realize that group seminars for 100 people suit you the best. These give you the highest odds of success (Probabilistic Thinking).
We then take another step backwards: if each group seminar of 100 people gives me, with my abilities, 20 clients, I’ll need to do about 50 seminars to get my 1000 clients this year. The question becomes: how can I organize 50 seminars with 100 people each?
Work backwards far enough and you’ll have identified the simplest and quickest step you can take now (for example, calling a friend who organizes such group seminars) to get you going on the path that leads to your desired outcome.
By working backwards we made the $1,000,000 go from some distant and seemingly unattainable result to an achievable one with a concrete step you can take right now. Pair it with knowing your circle of competence and probabilistic thinking, and every goal becomes within reach.
In life, if you want to get a particular job or get accepted into a particular university programme, working backwards is very powerful.
Ask yourself: what is the job (or programme) I want? What does it look like? Where is it?
Make the outcome as vivid as possible.
Then ask: how can I achieve it?
You may come up with various to achieve it or you may come up with only one way (get higher grades or send my resume). In that case, it pays to meet with people who have achieved what you want to achieve. Ask how they got to where you want to be.
Some answers will be in line with the ways you came up with, while others had taken a totally different path you never considered. Doing this you’ll realize:
- There are more ways than 1 to achieve your goal.
- There are many actions you can take to increase the odds of achieving your goal in your favour. Things you can do today, regardless of your resources or circumstances.
In the case of getting a particular job, you can find current or former employees (online or via mutual friends) who you have something in common with and start building a relationship.
In the case of getting accepted into a particular university programme, ask yourself: what do all the accepted students have in common? What are the outliers? If you have no money, how did others without money get in (scholarship, sponsored, etc)?
Often you can network with students, faculty or alumni. Again: find people you have something in common with and start building relationships. Alternatively, if volunteering or competitions are valued, figure out how you can do more of those to increase your odds of getting accepted.
Working backwards helps you realize that your goal can be achieved, gives you multiple ways to get there and helps you figure out how to get started today. If it doesn’t, talk with or study others who have achieved what you want to achieve. Remember: there are always more ways than one.