5.1 Three Horizons

The International Futures Forum’s ‘Three Horizons model’ [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] is a simple way to encourage conversations about challenges in the present, aspirations for the future and the innovation and solutions that maybe required to address these.

It is an approach that has been adopted and adapted by the Future Generations Commissioner for Wales, to create a toolkit for public bodies to use to assist with their long term futures planning.

In Video 10, Bill Sharpe (Founding Partner – Future Stewards, Independent Researcher in Science, Technology and Society) and Dr Louisa Petchey (Senior Policy Specialist – Public Health Wales) discuss how the Three Horizons approach was used to develop an approach to futures thinking.

As you watch the video, think about some of the earlier sections of the course and reflect on how comfortable you feel about futures planning now.

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Transcript: Video 10 Using the Three Horizons for futures planning

LOUISA PETCHEY:

Our very first step was to try and, as the office puts it, walk the walk rather than just talk the talk. So, we were very much starting from the basis of saying, how good are we at long-term thinking? How can we get better at doing features in this organisation?

And so, we were like, let's use this three-horizons model to help us think internally about what our vision is for these policy areas, like housing, what is concerning for us about the current situation, the things that we need to change, and how can we start thinking about what to do to get to that future vision? And, yeah, I remember using the three horizons as that first experience really of trying to flesh that out for the office and put that really long-term perspective on the work that the commissioner was planning to do.

BILL SHARPE:

Hmm. Something I've never been able to ask you before, but I'm interested now is, Graham and I were bringing three horizons out because for people who didn't know futures, it's a very easy entry point. And I know this conversation is how we've worked together, but you're a poster child for the fact that we did very little to support you. You just ran off with your colleagues and started using it and adopting it.

And I was sitting back in Pembrokeshire thinking, oh, I'm going to be getting calls and they'll be asking me to do stuff. And you really didn't very much. So, I'm really interested in what that experience was in the first few months as you started pioneering it and learning about doing futures. What was that like for you?

LOUISA PETCHEY:

I think it probably just reflects my futures naivety at the time because I think coming into the role, my understanding was that other people knew a lot more about futures than I did because it had never really been something I'd worked on before. And that you coming to present the three-horizons model, that loads of other people were already using it and I was already behind and needed to catch up.

So, I was just taking it as a given that this was a technique that I needed to use and that I needed to get my head around and figure out how I was going to bring that to the public sector in Wales. So, yeah, I just cracked on really because I already felt like this was the way that we needed to be working.

And I just tried to make it make sense to myself, knowing that I was coming to it from the same position as a lot of the public bodies would be, which is from not knowing very much at all, but knowing that it had to be a grounding feature of how we needed to work, this long-term thinking. So, I just knew that if it could make sense to me or somebody who didn't know anything about it before, then hopefully, it would be helpful for the public bodies I was working with as well.

BILL SHARPE:

One of the benefits we see of using three horizons is it doesn't only help you take that long-term view to think about the future but gets a conversation about change and transformation without having to use big, difficult words like systems thinking, that it orients people to looking at that change from where we are to the future we might want. Again, did you find that was a natural way in for you? Did it open up that space equally easily for you?

LOUISA PETCHEY:

I think what I discovered as I was starting to go out to public bodies and promote futures and the three-horizons model in particular is that it became apparent to me that by doing three horizons and having those three horizons conversations it wasn't just doing the long-term way of working but was actually helping to support public bodies to do all of the other ways of working as well.

So, it actually had that cross-cutting benefits that, like you say, convening that systems thinking because some of the other ways of working are integration, collaboration, involvement. So just the act of bringing those stakeholders together to identifying the other issues which aren't central to the discussion, but actually are really important when you're trying to think about that big picture of how you achieve transformational change.

Suddenly, I was able to sell it to public bodies as, actually, if you use these approaches, this is how you can live all five of the ways of working through one activity. Rather than seeing it as futures as a thing on the side that would be a nice to have, you can really use it to underpin how you do all of the ways of working.

I've always really thought of three horizons a bit of a gateway futures method because I know that whenever I'm invited to go and speak to a public body or any other stakeholder who is asking for that introduction to futures-- what is this, how does this fit in with the acts, what does it mean to think long term-- the three horizons is my go-to model for saying this is an example of how you can think long term. And then the relationship and their understanding of futures and how they can bring that into their work spirals from there. And I think in that way, it's a fantastic technique because it stops people seeing futures, thinking it's something scary and really difficult. Gets them over that threat and into thinking long term and understanding that it's not that alien. It's something that they can do.

And then with that confidence, they can go on to look at those different techniques to start bringing some depth into their three horizons conversation to look at what other tools are out there because they already feel like they know what they're doing a little bit more. I think that's a really powerful thing about three horizons.

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Video 10 Using the Three Horizons for futures planning

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Figure 20 Three Horizons model. (Source: Petchey, n.d.)

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Mae'r ffigwr yn dangos Model y Tri Gorwel, sy'n dangos sut all problem newid dros amser a phersbectifau gwahanol randdeiliaid. Mae'n cynnwys y geiriau goruchafiaeth ac amser, yna tair llinell, G1, gorwel 1 mewn coch, G2, gorwel 2 mewn glas a G3, gorwel 3 mewn gwyrdd.

Figure 20 Three Horizons model. (Source: Petchey, n.d.)

The Three Horizons approach can be used to consider the issue, how it might change over time and the different perspective of stakeholders. This is shown in Figure 20 and Table 7.

In video 11 below Bill Sharpe explains the Three Horizons approach.

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Transcript: Video 11 Overview of the Three Horizons approach

BILL SHARPE:

I spent most of my career in the computer industry. All through that time, I was on the leading edge of new things and having to think about the future and how the computing technology was likely to change. And, of course, computing changes every 10 or 15 years. The whole industry goes through complete cycles of renewal. So needed to find some ways of thinking about the future, constructing strategies for that, and working with businesses to sort out what we might do.

Most organisations were trying to think about the future, but without any experience of using these ways of working. So, I started working more closely with an organisation called International Futures Forum that had got together to anticipate the sort of problems that we're now experiencing of multiple interacting crises and seeing what could we do to give people more capacities to work on those problems.

So, what I do now is all to do with working on supporting organisations in how they think about the future and how they might bring about change. I do that particularly with an organisation called Future Stewards, which is a partnership of organisations working particularly with business and global organisations for more effective ways to change what we do so that 10 billion people will be able to live well on one planet.

Three horizons is just a really simple way of thinking about where we are, where we want to get to, and the process of change in between. So, we call the first horizon the everyday patterns of life that we're embedded in, the things that we rely on to work when we get up in the morning. And we either are responsible for those ourselves, putting food on the table, or expect other people to be responsible for them, like keeping the trains running or whatever it is.

That's the first horizon. And if we're having a three-horizon conversation, it's because we feel that, in some respects, that pattern of everyday life is either losing its fit to the future, maybe showing signs of strain or failure, or isn't really grasping what's opening up as some new opportunity.

So, the third horizon is that pattern of life that we anticipate or want to bring about that will replace the current first horizon over time-- that we'll reach out to that opportunity or repair the failings that we're seeing in the first.

And the second horizon is that rather messy space of transition where entrepreneurs try things out. Some things work. Some things fail. And, gradually, we sort out which new pattern is going to become the new third horizon. So, it's just a really simple way of exploring the patterns of life-- the ones we've got now, the ones we have some vision for in the future, and the entrepreneurial space of change in between.

It came about on a piece of work I was doing with some colleagues for the UK government's Foresight program. And we were just trying to find out, on a rather complex program, some suitable way of just structuring the work we were doing.

And I was particularly being asked about what sort of evidence do we have 50 years out. And I was saying, well, I can't really tell you. We don't have much evidence for the future, after all-- and then realised that the evidence we have of the future is just what people say they're going to try and do. So, whether or not I think somebody's ideas are good, if they say that's what they're trying to do, that's the sort of evidence of the future.

So that's how it actually came about. And then, over time, we started to find that this very simple way of having a conversation about the future was something that most people could just get hold of really quickly and easily and start to use. And when you realise that most people don't have any ways of working on the future, something simple that you can explain in a few minutes and people can start to use straight away is really valuable.

It doesn't exclude anybody. It takes you quite a long way into starting your journey into doing futures thinking more effectively. So, it doesn't compete with any other methods. They're all good. But most futures work grew up in an organisational environment where there were lots of resources for big projects and skilled practitioners to support you in doing that.

And that's not the situation we have now. We have a situation where everyone needs to think about change and needs some sort of tools to do it with. The challenges and questions come from, really, the topic that they're looking at. It can apply to anything, and what its advantage is that it begins to give people a sense of holding that complexity more effectively and seeing how they might get into action to do something about it.

So, it both lets people look at that situation and have some sense of understanding what they need to bring about, and also putting themselves into the picture, seeing what is their responsibility for it. So, of course, what they need to bring to it is a readiness to consider their own role in maintaining the first horizon, with all its weaknesses and difficulties, and a readiness to be really entrepreneurial and visionary and ambitious in bringing about change. So, it helps highlight what those real challenges actually are.

One of the groups I've been working with in the last couple of years is the Climate Champions. So, as you know, COP, the Conference of Parties-- the formal process is all those who are formal parties to the agreement. But around that, the Climate Champions convene all the other actors in society and business who are not part of the formal process but are very much part of the action.

So, each round of the COP talks brings in a high-level champion. In the UK, it was-- Nigel Topping was appointed to that-- and brings in a lot of people who will come in part time or full time seconded from organisations to work on campaigns and programs to marshal a societal-wide program of change.

And, again, many of these people have deep expertise in their own areas, but don't necessarily have any shared practice for thinking about the future. So, I've been working with Nigel Topping and the team, helping them build up some ways of shared working and, of course, using three horizons as a structure and framework for those different tools.

It already is accessible to all. Working with the International Futures Forum and colleagues in a small educational charity we've set up, we've put a lot of resources online that anybody can use for free. So, my ambition is that there's a wide variety of resources for thinking about the future and change that are completely free to use-- that we find some way of really creating a whole generation of people who will feel confident and able to use these ways of working to support the changes we need.

The two approaches share the name, three horizons. But the McKinsey approach was what I would call a one-dimensional approach to them. So, the first, second, and third horizons were just short, medium, and long term. Whereas what makes the three horizons frameworks as we've developed it really powerful is that you see these three horizons as all present at all times. And there's different ways that we as human beings relate to the future in the present.

So, the first horizon is that sense of being responsible for something. And we've never got enough time. We're always short of time. And we've got deadlines to meet. It's very much a time as a limited resource. The third horizon is when we think in terms of a visionary. We have dreams of the future. We make a decision about what we're going to stand for. So that's a different quality of being in the present moment, relating to the future. What am I going to stand for? Time isn't, then, a limitation. Time is just the present moment.

And in between the two is the sense of being an entrepreneur, where time is about the opportunity. The opportunity comes and goes. And am I going to go with this? Am I going to make this decision now? And so, you find that everybody can relate to that sense of being responsible as the manager, holding a vision, holding it in mind, or being an entrepreneur, going to an opportunity, and that those are three qualities of the future in the present moment. So, three horizons taps into that completely natural orientation we have to the future and makes it three-dimensional. It gives it a richer understanding and a richer potential for action

End transcript: Video 11 Overview of the Three Horizons approach

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Video 11 Overview of the Three Horizons approach

In the video Bill Sharpe explained that the Three Horizons approach draws attention to the three horizons as existing in the present moment, from which we can gather evidence about the future from the present, in order to consider different possible futures.

Each horizon is designed to allow you to explore the different possibilities.

All horizons should be looked at together to think about the changes between them overtime.

Activity 14 Consider how you can use the Three Horizons approach

Timing: 15 minutes

1. Watch the video in which Dr Louisa Petchey, explains the Three Horizons approach and how it can be used by public bodies to assist with long term planning.

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Transcript: Video 12 Using Three Horizons for long term planning

LOUISA PETCHEY

I'm Dr. Louisa Petchey. I'm a senior policy specialist at Public Health Wales, and part of my role involves working in partnership with the Future Generations Commissioner's Office, where we work together to try and help public bodies embed the long-term way of working in their thinking and planning as part of their duty under the Well-being of Future Generations Act.

So the partnership that Public Health Wales has with the Future Generations Commissioner's Office started towards the end of 2018 and was the result of the Commissioner recognising that the long-term way of working was one of the five ways of working under the Act that public bodies were finding the hardest to embed. So we agreed to have a shared role between Public Health Wales and the Office that would dedicate some of their time to thinking about Futures as a approach for embedding that long-term way of working into public bodies, so building awareness, skills, and confidence, really, for public bodies in starting to use these techniques and approaches in their day-to-day work.

We first started to use the Three Horizons Model internally to help the Commissioner and her team think through what their vision was for a lot of her priority policy areas, so topics like housing or planning or transport. And as we were working through this internally, we started to realise that this was exactly the same thinking journey that we wanted public bodies to be able to go on as well.

So we were really keen to start sharing the Three Horizons methodology with them too. So that's part of why we started developing the toolkit to provide them with the information they needed to be able to think about what is the ultimate goal that they're trying to work towards, what is the current situation, and how can they make sure that keeping that long-term goal in mind, their short-term decisions that they have to make are making it easier for them to reach that long-term goal rather than harder.

And also, one of the things that's really important in the Act is involvement. It's one of the five ways of working. And we wanted to share with them our experience of how using the Three Horizons in a participatory way is a fantastic way to get your stakeholders and citizens thinking about the future and using that involvement way of working so that you can start checking to see whether people have the same vision as you, whether you're working towards the same goal, and whether they have the same ideas as to what the best way of making that journey is.

So we were really keen to try and push the fact that thinking long term can also help you with your involvement as well. The Well-being of Future Generations Act requires public bodies in Wales to embed five ways of working in the way that they go about their work. One of these is the long-term way of working. And a short time into the Commissioner's role as a Future Generations Commissioner, she realised that of all the five ways of working, the one that public bodies were really struggling with the most was the long-term way of working. They just couldn't get a handle on what that actually involved doing.

That's when we came together and identified Futures and Futures techniques and approaches as a practical way that we could support public bodies to think long term. What we really liked about the Three Horizons Model was just how quick and easy it was to understand.

After a very quick five-minute introduction to the model, you can dive straight into having really rich discussions. And then once you've hooked people in, you can build on that iteratively. And after each conversation, go a little bit deeper until you've got a really comprehensive picture. But you've got people over that threshold and starting to think about the long-term without having it as a scary, big project.

The other thing that we really liked about it provided us with a shortcut language to talk about really complicated topics and issues that we shared. So in particular, the idea of an H2 plus and an H2 minus innovation very quickly allows people to understand whether you're talking about something which is a stepping stone to genuine transformational change or just a sticking plaster that's going to keep the current system ticking over but isn't really going to be helping you reach your long-term goal. One of the great things about the Three Horizons Model is it gives you a structured way to talk to your team or your stakeholders and reach a shared understanding of what your long-term goal is, what is your vision.

Because once you've got that in place, it becomes much easier to think about what you're going to do in order to reach that goal, and you can use the language of the Three Horizons Model to understand, in a shared way, what are the sticking plasters that are just holding things together versus what are the actual, truly transformational ideas that are going to help you reach that long-term goal together.

End transcript: Video 12 Using Three Horizons for long term planning

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Video 12 Using Three Horizons for long term planning

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2. Review the ‘Three horizons: A toolkit to help you think and plan for the long-term’ (Petchey, n.d.) and plan a workshop (see p. 11 of the toolkit) with your colleagues outside the time allocated to studying this course. Familiarise yourself with the model and focus on an issue/problem you wish to address together.

You may wish to make notes on how you will approach this, below.

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If you wish to develop your understanding of the Three Horizons approach further, the International Futures Forum and H3 Unit provide access to guidance on using the approach and resources that are freely available for use.

• Three Horizons (iffpraxis.com)
• Three Horizons (h3uni.org)