AUGust 26, 2025
In “The Time Traveler’s Guide to Philanthropy: Funding the Future, Backward,” Climate Breakthrough Executive Director Savanna Ferguson shares her experience leading a session this past June at the 2025 TED Countdown Summit on “right-to-left thinking” and how it can help philanthropy create breakthroughs.
Below are excerpts from her Inside Philanthropy commentary on how philanthropy can use right-to-left thinking and transform our approach to systems change.
Too often, funders begin with the question: What’s feasible? What can be measured, delivered, controlled? So
funders give money to what feels safe. We invest in incremental progress. We seek outcomes we can count: meals served, training sessions completed, tons of carbon captured, while the systems we hope to transform may continue to falter.
This mindset often leads us to manage the margins of a crisis rather than confront its root causes. When we start with limitations or constraints, we end up pushing for small changes instead of big ones. We fund what seems feasible instead of what might be necessary.
But there’s another way to think about change. Start with the future we need and work backward to figure out
what must begin today. This isn’t just about setting bigger goals. It’s about changing how we fund change: what we support, what risks we take, and what relationships we build.
In June, I was honored to organize and host a session at the TED Countdown Summit in Nairobi, Kenya, on how
to pursue breakthroughs. In a room of people working in climate or climate-adjacent fields, I asked them to
engage in some constructive daydreaming. I 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 truly new
ideas and shape actions and interventions that overcome or circumvent current (or imagined) constraints.
Right-to-left thinking not only changes what funders fund; it transforms how funders and grantees work
together. Right-to-left thinking fundamentally changes how funders evaluate proposals, define success metrics, and assess the level of support needed given the dynamic and complicated circumstances on the ground.