"We've just completed a departmental review, and apart from one or two little bugs in the system, everything we wrote in our Future-basing session just over a year ago is actually happening now - it's amazing!"

Alan Meredith, Regional Personnel Manager, National Rivers Authority (1993)

Background to Future-basing

Bill Phillips is the founder of Future-basing. He developed it after an enlightening experience in 1988.

Two years earlier, in a management seminar, he had to produce a three-year set of personal goals - something he found extremely hard to do. It took him three weeks, missing the seven-day deadline in his diary.

Unable to determine what he should write, Bill eventually gave up trying to be realistic and instead wrote a whole list of fantasy-like scenarios.

On completing the management programme, he put the ring binder on the shelf and forgot about it.

In 1988, Bill suggested to someone he was coaching, that they might find value in using the goal-setting format, despite the fact it had not worked for himself.

What it does

Talking through his own plan as an example, Bill was shocked to find that every one of the goals he had written was now already realised or well advanced. Yet he had definitely NOT followed the plan!  

As he thought through the route that had brought him to his current scenario, certain patterns emerged - and so began the evolution of Future-basing. The effect of the methodology on the first group he tested it on were nothing short of remarkable. These methods were refined through serious thinking and experimentation over time to come to the structure of Future-basing(TM) that is used today.