Backcasting

[5] In statistics and data analysis, backcasting can be considered to be the opposite of forecasting; thus: Backcasting, a term first coined by John B. Robinson in 1982,[8] involves establishing the description of a very definite and very specific future situation.

[11] In 2006, the Capital Regional District Water Services, which services the greater Victoria area in British Columbia, Canada, committed to backcasting to the year 2050 as a formal element of all future strategic water planning initiatives.

It allows those working towards success to iteratively test whether their creation or solution is moving in the right direction.

It has been refined and tested by peer-review and application within businesses (widely known examples are: Interface, Nike, Whistler, Volvo).

Backcasting is used in climate reconstruction or cosmology to determine the conditions (i.e., values of unknown independent variables) that existed in the distant past based on known (more accurately estimated) values of past dependent variables.