#FlashbackFriday to our executive director Savanna Ferguson leading a workshop on “The Secret to Unlocking Breakthroughs” at the TED Countdown Summit in Nairobi this past June. In a packed room of people working in climate or climate-adjacent fields, Savanna asked them to engage in some constructive daydreaming. She asked the group to imagine the world of 2060: a world in which all of their hopes and dreams have been achieved, a world with a stable climate. Instead of planning from ‘where we are’ to ‘where we might go,’ we started in the future we want and then worked our way backward to identify the barriers to that future and, from that, the interventions we need to launch today to remove those barriers. This exercise is called right-to-left thinking. And it can be incredibly powerful in allowing us to form new ideas and shape actions and interventions that overcome or circumvent current (or imagined) constraints. This is a core component of Climate Breakthrough’s climate philanthropy model and one that we hope to see adopted more broadly. To imagine the world anew, we must place ourselves in an abundance mindset. Doubt kills far more ideas than failure will ever have the chance to do. Thank you to the @tedcountdown team for the generous invitation and support. Photos: Callie Giovanna/TED (fb)

The time traveler’s guide to philanthropy: funding the future, backward. Drawing from the packed session she led at this June’s @tedcountdown Summit in Nairobi, our executive director, Savanna Ferguson, expands on “right-to-left thinking” in her latest Inside Philanthropy commentary. (fb)