Interactive Tools

TOOL | Planning Community Change with Forecasting and Backcasting

Written by Daren Okafo | Jun 19, 2025 3:50:09 PM

what are forecasting and backcasting?

The forecasting/backcasting tool is part of the Futures family of facilitation approaches, and it presents an invaluable but relatively simple approach to bringing ideas about the future into our current thinking, planning, and strategizing in community work. Using these tools can help individuals and groups to facilitate a visioning or planning process that is grounded in evidence and lived experience, but which aims to positively disrupt our sets of expectations about our shared future and how we might develop ways of working which brings these aspirational futures into being with a degree of purpose and engagement.

 

Using this tool will help you to:

  • Make informed design choices about engaging with multiple possible futures based on experiences and data from the past and present.
  • Prepare for potential problematic futures by enabling critical scenario development.

  • Play with creative ways to bring possible futures into a near-view, enabling a strategic mode of action planning. 

  • Augment and contribute to strategic planning processes and organizational strategic reflection.