I first read about backwards induction in Keith Murnighan’s book, Do Nothing! It’s a really easy technique to achieve leadership goals and it can be easily adapted for projects. Here’s an introduction to backwards induction and how you can use it on your project.
Basically, you start at the end and then work your way back to the beginning. So, you’d set your project goals and then plan the activities that need to happen in order to achieve them. But instead of starting at the beginning and building up your task list from there, you start from the objectives. What is the thing that you need to do just before you reach that objective? What’s the thing you need to do before that? You build up your task list backwards.
If that doesn’t make sense, have a look at this diagram. You start by working out what step number 1 needs to be, then step number 2 and so on. You choose each step by establishing how it would logically lead to the next one.
Let’s look at a worked example. Let’s say that your project goal is to launch a successful website.
1. The last step before launching the website is to ensure that your support processes are in place for the launch
2. To get your support processes in place you have to ensure that the team is hired and trained.
3. To train the team, you need a working website to train them on.
4. To get a working website, you need to do a lot of testing. This will flush out the bugs and ensure that the site you use to train the team is as good as it can be.
5. To complete the testing, you need to have built the first version of the site.
6. To build the first version of the site you need customer requirements and a team of skilled developers.
This is a very simplistic path through a project. In real life, it could be more complicated (for example, you also need training materials to train the team) but you can see that it gives you an alternative way of building your work breakdown structure and task list.
You can use backwards induction to help you check that you haven’t left out any tasks. Run through your project plan from the end to the beginning and check that each step logically leads to the next one. Then, when you are comfortable with your project activities, you can put them into your project management software so they can be viewed online in products like Seavus Project Viewer.