Future-back thinking cannot be reserved for just the occasional offsite or even the heavy lift of our months-long vision and strategy development effort and the multiyear implementation process that follows. Once an enterprise reorients itself toward the portfolio of the future, it must ensure that its next generation of leaders continues to lead from the future. Boards must hire new CEOs who are aligned with the company’s vision, and leadership development efforts are needed within the organization to ensure that the up-and-coming executives who will run the next set of initiatives—and ultimately the enterprise as a whole—know how to think, plan, and learn continuously. Leaders and managers at every level can also help to drive future-back thinking and make it a way of life. This doesn’t mean that you must change your whole way of being. As noted earlier, present-forward thinking and processes will suffice for as much as 90 percent of your time. But to ensure a sustainable future, you must also spend time immersed in a different mindset—exploring, envisioning, and re-envisioning what is to come.

Of course, some leaders (the head of strategy, for example) will spend more time in the future; others (like the head of quality, for example) will spend much less. But all of them must carve out and preserve that time as individuals, as subgroups, and as a leadership team. Unconstrained by the distractions of the here and now, you must explore, envision, and discover, thinking from both the present forward and the future back as circumstances require.

The great strength of organizations is that they standardize processes and make them repeatable. As intuitive and imaginative as it is, future-back thinking can be institutionalized up to a point—both as a capability leaders must develop in themselves and one that should be encouraged and actively developed across the entire organization.