In more and more podcasts and presentations I hear sentences such as this one:
That is our strategy going forward.
What meaning does going forward add to the sentence? That is, how is it different than saying:
That is our strategy.
(I listened to two software podcasts recently: in the first going forward was used once, and in the second it was used twice and moving forward once. I have to say it connotes a slight sense of we have a team working hard on this, lots of motion, lots of action, but it could have been dropped in all four cases and no meaning would have been lost. In any case, people currently really love to use it!)
Best Answer
Going forward is almost a completely useless phrase. If one says [x] going forward, they mean [x] into the future, but it is very redundant, as one could just as easily say [x]. It seems that many business people want to sound as fancy as possible, so they use as many fancy words as possible to get the same point across. This leads to entire dialogues of contentless speech, filled with words devoid of meaning.
A BBC article puts it much more poetically than me:
I think it is a phrase that one should avoid as much as possible, as in the relatively short time it has been in use, it has been abused, hung out to dry, and abused again.
As ianjs has said, it is quite redundant. Redundancy isn’t a bad thing in itself, as it can help to reinforce points. But going forward is so cliché that its effect is lost.
The term can be useful in certain situations, such as “I will be polite to you, going forward”, but it sounds too much like the overused term, that it sounds nicer to say “From now on, I will be polite to you”, or “I am going to start being polite to you.”
Going forward just grates against my ears, and despite it being perfectly relevant in the above example, I would avoid using the term altogether. This is obviously a matter of opinion, but, because of the way the phrase has been used recently, it would be better to use a bit of imagination, and use different wording.
PS: This answer has had 4 up-votes and 3 down-votes, which means it is a very contentious issue. Take this answer with a grain of salt, and remember that English usage is subjective. This probably means that going forward annoys ⁴⁄₇ people who voted on this post, and that ³⁄₇ voters like the term.