Will your organization survive the next 25 years? More importantly, are the decisions you’re making today planting the seeds of future irrelevance?
The US Coast Guard wrestled with these questions and discovered something counterintuitive: to truly understand today’s challenges, you need to view them from 25 years in the future. Their Project Evergreen initiative proved this—but only after failing spectacularly for 15 years first.
The Expensive Lesson: Brilliant Strategy, Zero Implementation
Imagine pouring 15 years into strategic planning. Your organization assembles the best minds, conducts sophisticated scenario workshops, and produces detailed roadmaps. The forecasts are prescient. The analysis is sharp. The strategies are comprehensive.
Then everything hits reality and dies on impact.
This was Project Evergreen’s painful trajectory. Every strategic plan they delivered landed, in their words, “like most additional work at an office with an already full plate: dead on arrival.” Inbox after inbox received these plans. Nearly all went unimplemented.
The Coast Guard had built “isolated, independent cogs” that required “considerable effort to forcefully engage into the many turning mechanisms” of actual organizational planning. Picture trying to force a rigid gear into machinery that’s already running—that’s what executing these strategies felt like for frontline teams.
Why did meticulously crafted strategies produce such dismal results?
The Question That Poisoned 15 Years of Planning
For a decade and a half, Project Evergreen asked what seemed like a perfectly reasonable question: “What should the Coast Guard do?”
If you’ve sat through strategic planning sessions, this probably sounds familiar. It’s typically the first question on the agenda. What should we do about artificial intelligence? How should we respond to digital transformation? What’s our climate change strategy?
The problem isn’t obvious at first glance. This question appears logical, even necessary. But it creates a fatal dynamic.
When you ask “What should we do?” you’re asking workshop participants—typically senior strategists and consultants—to prescribe solutions. These prescriptions then get handed down to implementers who weren’t in the room and didn’t shape the solutions. As the Coast Guard discovered, “the ideal people to do the job might not be in the room.”
This creates what I call supply-side strategy: strategists manufacture solutions and push them onto implementers. Those solutions arrive as rigid directives disconnected from operational reality.
The fundamental flaw isn’t that strategists are separated from implementers—there are simply too many implementers to fit in a retreat. The flaw is the question itself.
Present-Forward Thinking: Perfect for Tactics, Fatal for Transformation
That innocent-sounding question—”What should we do?”—invisibly locks your thinking into a present-forward orientation.
Present-forward thinking starts with today. It analyzes current problems, extrapolates existing trends, and prescribes solutions based on incremental projections. This approach works brilliantly for everyday management. It’s ideal for hitting quarterly targets, solving operational problems, and managing predictable challenges.
But for 25-year transformation? It’s disastrous.
Why? Because present-forward thinking generates tactical responses to current conditions. It can’t account for fundamental shifts in your organization’s operating environment. It can’t help you prepare for demands that don’t yet exist. It treats the future as a slightly modified version of today.
Case in point: In 2001, Kodak had abundant, recent evidence that digital photography was no threat to traditional business. The present-forward mindset dominated the thinking of executives and blocked the possibilities.
Managers use present-forward thinking each day because it’s the default mode for problem-solving. But that’s exactly why it fails for long-range strategy. This familiar mode becomes invisible, and organizations apply it to challenges it was never designed to address.
The Cognitive Shift That Changed Everything
After 15 years of failure, the Coast Guard discovered the fundamental shift required: from present-forward to future-back thinking.
This framework, developed by strategy theorists Mark Johnson and Josh Suskewicz, represents a complete cognitive reorientation. Instead of starting with today’s problems and projecting forward, you start with 2050’s probable demands and work backward.
The new question becomes: “What demands will the organization face?”
This isn’t semantic trickery. It’s a fundamentally different way of thinking about strategy.
When the Coast Guard made this shift, they began identifying what they call “robust strategic needs”—outcomes required by specific long-term futures, each demanding particular strategic responses.
Here’s the critical difference: prescriptive solutions constrain implementers. Strategic needs empower them.
Prescriptions say “do this.” Strategic needs say “accomplish this outcome”—and then trust implementers to craft solutions suited to their specific contexts and the evolving reality they’re navigating.
How Future-Back Thinking Works in Practice
Project Evergreen now runs workshops that map multiple plausible 2050 scenarios. They explore various futures the Coast Guard might face—different geopolitical landscapes, climate conditions, technological capabilities, maritime threats.
Then something critical happens. As the project team explained: “The solution space had to be left to the people who were actually going to implement the solution.”
Instead of receiving detailed instructions, implementers receive strategic needs. They’re asked to “deconstruct and then reconstruct” these needs for their specific operational contexts.
This approach works because objectives spanning 25 years can’t be prescribed with any accuracy. The future will unfold in unexpected ways. Game-changing strategies require flexible frameworks that can adapt as conditions evolve. Strategic needs provide that framework. Rigid tactical plans don’t.
The result: Project Evergreen became what they call a “backdoor strategic contributor”—guiding organizational direction without constraining operational flexibility.
The 2025 Payoff from 2050 Thinking
Here’s where this approach delivers immediate value.
Future-back thinking reveals which of today’s “urgent” priorities are actually superfluous. When you clearly understand the demands your organization will face in 25 years, some current problems simply fade in importance. The larger perspective exposes which fires are worth fighting and which will burn out on their own.
This prevents wasting resources on solutions that won’t address actual long-term demands.
It also transforms implementer motivation. Instead of following someone else’s prescriptions, teams gain the autonomy to design solutions matched to their reality. That autonomy—the flexibility to meet strategic needs in contextually appropriate ways—creates genuine engagement and inspiration.
Applying This to Your Organization
Consider your organization’s long-range planning through this lens.
The present-forward approach asks: “What should we do about immediate challenges?” This generates aspirational goals—”become industry leader,” “achieve digital transformation,” “reach carbon neutrality”—often disconnected from implementation reality. These sound impressive in board presentations but provide little practical guidance for teams expected to deliver them.
The future-back approach asks: “What demands will our organization face in 2050?” This identifies strategic needs that divisions must customize for their contexts.
For example, rather than prescribing “implement AI across all functions, ”you might identify a strategic need for “decision-making capabilities that scale with data complexity.” Different departments can then develop solutions suited to their unique challenges—customer service might deploy conversational AI, logistics might focus on predictive routing, finance might build automated risk assessment.
A flexible framework instead of a rigid mandate.
The Counterintuitive Truth
The Coast Guard’s expensive lesson offers a counterintuitive truth: you need tomorrow’s perspective to understand today’s priorities.
Organizations that begin with present-forward thinking remain trapped in tactical responses to current conditions. They mistake busy-work for strategy. They confuse detailed plans with transformation.
Organizations that embrace future-back thinking gain something more valuable: clarity about which current actions actually matter for long-term survival.
That 25-year horizon isn’t about predicting the future perfectly. It’s about developing the perspective to distinguish signal from noise in the present.
The question isn’t whether your organization will face existential demands by 2050. It will. The question is whether you’re building the strategic foundation today to meet those demands—or whether you’re sowing the seeds of irrelevance while obsessing over quarterly results.
The answer starts with asking a different question.
Source: Project Evergreen’s Long-Range Strategic Planning, United States Naval Institute