Brian J. Back

I like to think that over the past five-plus years, our amazing team at Sustainable Industries has had a fair amount of positive impact for, well, sustainable industries. But often we’ve wanted to do more, and certainly we’ve had our share of challenges. As such, our team recently circled the wagons and held an all-staff meeting to address an internal issue we wanted to focus and improve upon.

During this meeting, Associate Editor Becky Brun described to our team the concept of “backcasting,” a key strategic approach for sustainable business. Unlike forecasting, which predicts the future based on current trends, backcasting imagines what a successful outcome in the future looks like, followed by the question, “What do we need to do today, and the day after, to reach that vision?”

Forecasting, while it certainly has its place in business, tends to present a more limited range of options, and it often yields shortsighted, patch-like solutions. Worse, it projects the problems of today into the future. Backcasting, meanwhile, can open the door to a lot more innovation and creativity. Wall Street, policymakers and business media take heed: Do you really think we can fully gauge today’s unprecedented economic and environmental problems based on the oil embargo of the ‘70s or the Reagan-era recession?

All of this talk of backcasting was prompted by Becky’s interview of Dr. Karl-Henrik Robèrt for this month’s cover feature. On a personal level, the backcasting conversation took me back to a warm day in the year 2000, in the flower-filled gardens of the Jimmy Carter Library & Museum on Freedom Parkway in Atlanta, where I was first introduced to Dr. Robèrt, as well as Ray Anderson of Interface Inc. and others who were working on a definition of sustainable business that both the new entrants and old stalwarts pull from today, with varying results. If one man helped me, a then-twentysomething business journalist, grasp the notion of sustainability, it was this same articulate Swedish oncologist, Dr. Robèrt.

Though the sustainability movement has been underway, diligently practiced and talked about, in many ways for many years now, “sustainable” has risen as a mainstream adjective of choice in recent months, perhaps because “green” has become so postmodern and tired (I think it was the curlyhaired doofus who kept repeating “green”-this and “green”-that in recent Toyota commercials who finally did it in). And even though everyone in the green business world is now talking about “authenticity,” it usually comes more in the form of how to brand yourself as authentic, not how to actually be authentic.

Pondering this pickle, I recently approached one of our “20 Leading Green Execs” profiled in the June 2008 edition of Sustainable Industries and posed the question: Is evaluating a company’s business practices enough, or should we be focusing on the company’s fundamental business model?
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