Thinking Backwards (Penser à l'envers)

Thinking Backwards is a methodology for institutional, organisational, and individual decision-making, built on a single inversion: rather than seeking confirmation of existing hypotheses, it starts from observable failure and works backwards to the premise that made it probable. The need for it crystallised under pressure from AI governance, which condenses and accelerates vulnerabilities already present in human institutions — confirmation bias, decisional opacity, the political neutralisation of dissent — and can industrialise the errors that follow from them. The methodology's object is not AI, however, but a structure of reasoning transposable to any system that protects a founding premise despite repeated failure to produce the results it predicts. License: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0). Full text: creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0 Author: Caroline J. Caldwell — Independent Researcher, CJC Consult, Geneva. ORCID: 0009-0003-1319-3729 · Web: carolinejcaldwell.ch Part of: GaiaSentinel — an ethical architecture that declares what it cannot close. DOI: https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/T4X8H