The Retrocasting Sprint is a 2-day workshop that reverse engineers your long-term vision into a roadmap of lean-startup experiments so that you can iterate towards your moonshot. It includes a series of facilitated activities where you’ll create high-level milestones, identifying key challenges, and crafting a series of experiments so your team leaves passionate and confident with actionable next steps.

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Tip: This workshop tends to be most effective after a Futurecast Sprint so that your team has alignment on your long-term vision and can describe what success looks like.

Breaking a big vision down into actionable steps can feel like a daunting task. How do you create a strategy that's robust enough to make constant progress towards your long-term vision, yet flexible enough to make progress with the resources and problems you have today? We like to think of great strategy like a mountain with outposts. The vision remains fixed at the peak, while there may be many routes to get there. This workshop helps your team identify those routes and connect what you’re working on today with the long-term vision.

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First, we’ll help you define your long-term, medium-term, and short-term timespans and create milestones with the key results you’ve identified. Then, you’ll identify and prioritize potential roadblocks to reaching your long-term vision. What are the major challenges that stand between the current day and achieving your moonshot? Is it a technological breakthrough? Market adoption? Regulatory approvals? Only once you’ve identified the major challenges can you start crafting experiments to address them.

After identifying potential roadblocks and placing them on your timeline, we’ll turn those roadblocks into challenge statements. How have other organizations tackled these roadblocks? Is there any inspiration we can draw from seemingly unrelated that might help us break through these roadblocks faster? You’ll work with leading hackers, hustlers, and designers to help you frame your key challenges and look at how you might address them with a fresh set of eyes.

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We believe that every initiative, every action, and every bet that an organization takes should help you learn more about your problem space. From a new marketing campaign to a prototype, everything you build can help you gain a competitive advantage through earning knowledge that nobody else has. That’s why we think of great strategy as a series of experiments, not a rigid roadmap. A great experiment has a testable hypothesis, a measure of success, a beginning and an end.

You can think of your organization as a machine that runs experiments, iterating towards your long-term vision. The trick is balancing experiments that help accelerate your learning to break through key challenges while being in alignment with your long-term vision. The more people that can think this way in your organization, the faster you’ll make progress towards your moonshot.

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After working with our team to ideate experiments, we’ll help you prioritize them by impact and effort. That will help you understand which experiments are most important to take action on today. Also, because we’ve grouped experiments by time-span, you’ll know what challenges await you in the future and how you might deal with them.

Some teams even put this experiment timeline up as a poster so that everyone on the team knows what the roadmap looks like and how the actions they’re taking today align with the long term vision. It’s our hope that the tools learned in the Retrocasting Sprint help organizations tackling moonshots make more efficient use of their resources and are able to achieve their moonshots faster than expected!