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One of the things I like about Three Horizons is that in mapping a model of change in a single space, it also does two more things.

First, it doesn’t ignore weak signals of change, or emerging issues. These are usually identified in competent scanning, but then get squeezed out of the analysis in the most widely published scenarios methods, in which “important and uncertain” are privileged in the development of the scenarios.

Second, it allows for the creation of preferred visions of the future (normative futures), again in contrast to the dominant scenarios processes, which tend to be more positivist. A bit more than this, as well: it also allows the route towards the vision to be tested in a way that allows steps towards it to be identified.

(If you need to know more about Three Horizons, there’s a version of the foundational article here.)

Imagining

For me this sits well with Ruth Levitas’ work on “Utopia as method”, when she describes utopian thinking like this:

(I)t allows us, in imagining an entirely different society, to break from the present at least in imagination. This break is not, of course absolute. Our imaginative reach is limited. Both the issues that preoccupy us and our posited transformations in response to them are heavily dependent on our social and historical circumstances.

She also quotes the French sociologist Andre Gorz on utopias:

‘it is the function of utopias … to provide us with the distance from the existing state of affairs which allows us to judge what we are doing in the light of what we could or should do’.

Or heart and hands, if you like. There’s much more in her paper, linked above.

Visioning

There’s potentially a whole riff here on whether these dominant North American methods are positivist because that’s a function of American academic culture. After all, their sociology and economics is also more positivist, at least historically, as power relationships are quietly excluded through process, but that’s for another time.

In recovering these elements of preferred futures, it also reclaims the history of visioning which has long been marginalised in all of the noise eclipsed by scenarios methods. Yet, of course, the first modern futures book (Fred Polak’s The Image of the Future) was about the role of visions (images) in shaping the kind of society and the kind of world we want. His book is out of print, but a pdf can be found online.

There’s a famous quote from his book which has adorned a thousand posters:

Freeing the future

And Wendy Schultz quotes a passage from Polak’s book in her presentation on visioning at the Tools for Hope site:

These images must have the power to tear our civilization loose from the claws of the present and free it once more to think about and act for the future. The seed of these images becomes the life-blood of our culture, and the transfiguration of our civilization waits upon the sowing of new seed.

Scenarios, meanwhile, became associated with military strategy, and later Big Oil, which, as is well known, had access to bigger budgets and readier access to the ears of policy makers, and was also no challenge to dominant discourses. Boys and toys.

Peace movement

There’s more to write on this [1], but one reason why visioning got eclipsed maybe because it became associated with both the peace movement and community activism through the work respectively of Warren Ziegler and Elise Boulding and Robert Jungk. (Boulding learnt Dutch to translate Polak’s book into English.)

Ziegler and Boulding focused on ‘a world without weapons’ in their workshops. Robert Jungk developed a community futures method, which he wrote up in his book Futures Workshop, sadly out of print at present. This involved a three-day process that started with a cathartic critique of the things that were wrong with the present, and then moved on during the second day to ask how we would want those things to be reorganised in the future. The third part built the journey from one to the other.

As Jim Dator pointed out in his sympathetic critique of of Jungk’s model, the one thing that’s missing in this is an opportunity to take a view of emerging futures to provide a context for that move from catharsis to hope to action. This gap was brought home to me early in the 2000s when Demos used a different engagement model, Open Space, for a bit of community futuring for the Scottish Highlands town of Nairn. They didn’t have a futures immersion session; at the end of the work, it turned out that what Nairn would really need in 2020 was a fully dualled road to Inverness.

Patterns of process

More broadly though, I’m struck that both Robert Jungk’s method, and Future Search, which was developed later, have a dialogue pattern that starts with present discontents, jumps to a better future, and then comes back to agree on what needs to be done to bridge the gap between them.

Written like that, it is the same set of mental models that sit underneath the typical Three Horizons questions, which start with Horizon 1, then move to Horizon 3, and come back to Horizon 2. (Although starting with Horizon 3 and coming back to Horizon 1 also works, sometimes better, because it shifts people out of the present.) I find it reassuring that three different approaches to the same futures problem, which as far as I know were developed independently of one another, have constructed the process in the same way.

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[1] Looking back at this piece now, I realise that the questions that emerged here ended up being the research question for my long chapter “A Critical History of Scenarios”, in the Routledge Handbook of Social Futures, published early in 2022.

The International Futures Forum, based in Scotland, has been at the forefront of developing the Three Horizons model as a framework for futures practice. They have an article published in the current issue of Ecology and Society, called “Three Horizons: a pathways practice for transformation”, that is worth discussion. The full article can also be downloaded from the Ecology & Society site.

I’ve written about Three Horizons before on this blog and in the Journal of Futures Studies, and have used it as a futures tool in my own practice. I’ve found it valuable as a method to help groups focus on the challenges of “acting on the future.” In brief, it is a systems framework that has a model of change embedded within it.

Horizon 1 is the current dominant model in any given system; Horizon 3 is the range of emerging practices in the system, often associated with visionary models of change; and Horizon 2 is the adaptive resonses by Horizon 1 actors to Horizon 3 ideas and practices.

Pathways practice

The “pathways practice” described in the article involves five steps, and in this article I am going to reflect on these.

• Step 1: Examining current concerns
• Step 2: Exploring future aspirations
• Step 3: Exploring inspirational practice in the present
• Step 4: Innovation in play
• Step 5: Essential features to maintain.

The article maps these five steps onto a worked example for a project. For simplicity, I’ve mapped the stages back onto the standard 3H diagram, seen at the top of the post.

(Source: Sharpe et al, “Three Horizons: a pathways practice for transformation, Ecology & Society 21(2)).

Reading the article, and the description of their practice, I think there are five observations that are worth pulling out by way of amplifying the argument.

– 1. Three Horizons’ connection to visioning

The first visioning method I learned was the future workshop, by Robert Jungk and Norbert Mullert, and outlined in their book Future Workshops, published in an English version by the Institute of Social Inventions in 1987, and sadly currently out of print. They had a three-stage process. A first session (“critique phase”) listed everything that was wrong now; a second (“fantasy phase”) identified what you’d want to happen in a perfect world; and a third (“implementation phase”) developed ideas to bridge the gap between the two.

The first two steps of Three Horizons are broadly consistent with this visioning method, and others that borrowed from it, which is reassuring. There’s also a well-known critique of Jungk’s process by Jim Dator, to the effect that it doesn’t have a preliminary stage that puts participants into a future-facing mindset before it starts the “critique” face. (I recall a project by Demos around the turn of the century, from memory about the Scottish town of Nairn in 2020, that used Jungk’s method and demonstrated this issue. The top-ranked need for Nairn in 2020 was judged to be improving the dual carriageway to Inverness.)

Three Horizons doesn’t explicitly have Dator’s initial future immersion stage, but Stage 3, effectively exploring emerging issues, should make this happen if the group is not too locked into the present.

– 2. The role of lock-in

If you read too much business literature, “lock-in” is a bad thing. It prevents innovation by tying behaviour into a particular set of infrastructure and systems. But there is “good lock-in” as well. In richer countries when we flick the switch we expect the light to come on. We want our water to be clean. We expect to know which side of the road people will be driving on. So in a transition, we need to know the expectations about what’s essential and what’s not. In the Three Horizons practice, this is captured in Step 5, “what is essential to maintain?” As a futurist, this question sometimes get overlooked in futures processes: the excitement of the new tends to overshadow the role of the old.

– 3. Dilemmas

Tony Hodgson, one of the paper’s authors, has done much work building on the “dilemma theory” developed originally by Charles Hampden-Turner, and this is explored in the paper. The insight in dilemma theory is that decisions are often framed as choices, or trade-offs, between alternatives or a series of alternatives; more, that those alternatives are frequently between hard limits and soft systems or cultural consequences. I’m simplifying here, but Hampden-Turner used the Greek myth of Scylla and Charybdis–on one side the rocks, on the other the whirlpool–as a metaphor to bring this to life. Trade-offs are sub-optimal solutions pretty much by definition, a NO/BUT response. The trick is to break the trade-off with an innovation that reframes the issue by creating a YES/AND solution, a breakthrough idea.

– 4. Making power explicit

The paper has a refreshingly direct take on power, and its role in making change happen, or in preventing it. Having done a degree in social and political sciences, in the UK, I was brought up on this (Michael Mann and Stephen Lukes come to mind) but it’s often absent from futures work and futurist discourse, Indeed, this is Richard Slaughter’s complaint (in Futures Beyond Dystopia) about the way that in business futures scenarios become a “flatland” in which “current ideologies… were seen as natural”.

The authors of the paper are explicit on this:

Deliberate societal transformation involves intentionally trying to direct patterns of change. This requires exploring who has the power to resist or bring about change, to what extent change can be created, and the relationships between different actors.

Indeed, some of the language that practitioners have developed around Horizon 2, of “H2-” and “H2+”, is about the way that dominant actors, usually incumbents, either deploy their power and influence to delay or kill off change, which would be an H2- response (think of banks since the Global Financial Crisis, or utilities’ typical response to renewables), or use it to facilitate transition (H2+). H2+ is rarer.

In turn this raises the wider question for me of why Actor Network Theory has not been explored more fully by futurists. Actor analysis is a building block for the French prospective method (see Michel Godet, opens pdf, on this). Outside of France, I’m aware of papers by Zhan Li and Farzana Dudhwala. It’s a lacuna.

– 5. Worldviews and dialogue

One of the rich elements that has emerged from the Three Horizons is an insight into the way people with different perspectives on the future see each other. This comes from thinking developed by Jim Ewing and Ian Page. Simply put, conversations between actors who are most comfortable operating in different Horizons are a dialogue of the deaf.

[T]hose responsible for the first horizon systems that are important for daily life, who have to meet ever greater obligations for accountability, transparency, and so on, often regard the third horizon visionary as an irritating and unrealistic nuisance. The third horizon pioneer, in contrast, will often regard the first horizon manager as a dinosaur who is blocking change. Yet, when each party is able to see that if no one keeps the current system going, the future cannot be resourced, and that if there is no action toward future needs, the existing system will collapse, then a much more fruitful discussion becomes possible.

A useful table in the paper, which I have adapted as a matrix for the purposes of this blog post, sets out the way different Horizon practitoners see each other.

(Source: Sharpe et al, “Three Horizons: a pathways practice for transformation, Ecology & Society 21(2), adapted by AndrewCurry)

Often we’re not sufficiently aware of worldview and purpose when we’re engaged in workshops, which is one of the reasons why de Bono invented his thinking hats. This positioning aspect of the Three Horizons’ process has a similar role in futures work: What voice are you speaking in right now? What role are you in when you are listening?

The full paper can be dowloaded from the Ecology and Society website.