Column B Thinking
Plan from the dream future backward, not from the bricks in front of you.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~ongoing to results
- Steps
- 3
- Confidence
- 95%
Two ways to plan: Column A starts from today's resources ('what can I stack with these bricks?') and can only produce so much. Column B starts from the perfect future you want to exist in, then works backward to build it. Perkins credits Column B as the single biggest factor in Canva's success — Column A for a university student with no company would have been 'nothing.'
Origin
Articulated by Melanie Perkins (Canva co-founder/CEO); she notes the same dream-backward approach is how Brian Chesky ran Airbnb.
Core principles
- 01Column A = incremental planning bounded by current resources
- 02Column B = imagine the magical future first, then reverse-engineer the path
- 03The bigger your current constraints, the more you need Column B — starting from nothing means Column A yields nothing
- 04Vision precedes capability: you don't need to know how yet
How to run it
- 1
Imagine the future you actually want
Ignore feasibility. Ask what the future of your industry (publishing, transport, healthcare) should look like and what world you want to live in.
Pro tip Make it physical — Perkins keeps a wall in her office depicting her vision for the world in 2050.
- 2
Reject the brick-stacking default
Notice when you're only asking 'how high can I stack the bricks around me?' That is Column A and it caps your ceiling at incremental.
Watch out Day-to-day inputs (email, Slack, the reality around you) constantly pull you back into Column A. You must deliberately make time to leave it.
- 3
Commit to a future worth years of work
Pick a future so compelling you'll invest years or decades willing it into existence, then apply it to a concrete beachhead market.
Pro tip Canva applied the same online-collaborative-simple design vision first to Australian school yearbooks (Fusion Books), then scaled it far bigger as Canva.
In the wild
As a university student with no company, product, or software experience, Perkins says her realistic (Column A) starting point 'would have been nothing frankly.' So the entire venture was Column B — imagining that design would inevitably become online, collaborative, and simple, despite having no idea whether she could build it.
→ Canva grew to a $42B+ valuation, $3.3B revenue, ~240M monthly active users.
Common mistakes
Planning only from current resources
Stacking the bricks you already have caps ambition at what's incrementally reachable, so you never attempt the wildly valuable future that would require capabilities you don't yet possess.
Letting the daily inbox set the agenda
Email, Slack, and immediate reality naturally dominate attention and keep you in Column A. Without protected time to imagine the future, the dream never gets defined.
Is it for you?
Best for
Founders and product leaders at the earliest stage deciding what to build and how ambitious to be
Not ideal for
Pure execution phases where the vision is set and the job is disciplined incremental delivery
From the transcript
“So I guess the column B thinking is thinking about what is that magical wonderful future that you then want to invest years and decades…”
“column A would have been nothing frankly because you know the reality was when I was a university student with no company”
“you can look at the bricks around you and you can say what can I do with these bricks how high can I stack them”
From the episode
The woman behind Canva shares how she built a $42B company from nothing
Melanie Perkins