Future-Back

I've done some backcasting before now in my work with clients but I liked the way this is framed in this article in terms of how most leaders think 'present-forwards' rather than 'future-back' 

'Present-forward leaders build their organizations in increments, following the rules and procedures that work today. Future-back leaders, in contrast, visualize what their organizations could be, starting from a clean sheet, and then mobilize whatever they need in order to bring it into being. Future-back thinking doesn’t replace present-forward thinking—it complements and completes it.'

Present-forwards extrapolates out from contemporary known knowns and known unknowns. Future-back allows you to think outside of the constraints of current contexts, take account of how those contexts and possibilities may change, and more importantly focus on how you can turn possible futures into plausible ones, and then plausible futures into probable ones. 

HT @gleonhard for the link