This article was originally written for the Association of Professional Futurists’ newsletter, Compass, in 2015. It has been available on Medium. I am republishing a version of it here because Medium is a less useful platform than it used to be, and so that it can be found by people looking for my pieces on Three Horizons in one place.

Three Horizons is a futures method that allows individuals and workshop groups both to assess the current system and a future possible system, and to understand the dynamics of the transition between them. For people new to Three Horizons, I’ve blogged about it, and co-authored a journal article with Tony Hodgson, one of the two co-creators of the method. Bill Sharpe, the other co-creator, has also written a more personal book about using Three Horizons in his visioning work.

In a listserv discussion at the Association of Professional Futurists, people who have used the method said they find it an effective way to get groups to structure their thinking about the future in a way that allows them to see multiple models of the future at the same time. This has been my experience as well. The critics said they couldn’t see what was distinctive about the model: now, future, some transition between them. There are other models out there, they said, that look much the same.

Practitioners and theorists

One contributor, trying to be helpful, said that perhaps the difference of opinion was between practitioners (by implication pragmatic about methods) and theorists (by implication more concerned about rigour). I didn’t much care for the distinction. As the French are supposed to say, “Yes, I can see that it works in practice. But how does it work in theory?” Good methods and good models should do both.

My purpose here is to try to connect theory and practice. The first thing to say is that the Three Horizons is, at heart, a systems model. Tony Hodgson is a systems practitioner by training and practice, and to the extent that he has engaged in futures work it has been to try to apply systems tools to it. But futures work is also concerned with systems. All good futures projects should start with a question or a statement that frames the “system under scrutiny”. Without that, there is no boundary to the work (Hodgson and Midgley, 2014). Of course this is a construct; all models are simplifications. But they are necessary simplifications.

Degrees of fitness

One of the important characteristics of Three Horizons, therefore, is that the horizons are not just lines; they are each a system. And a little more: they are systems with varying degrees of fitness for the existing landscape.

So Horizon One has, at present, a high degree of fitness in the landscape. This includes its underlying assumptions, its institutional arrangements, its infrastructure, its assemblages of actors, its flows of materials, and so on. However, because all systems lose their fitness over time, unless they change, Horizon One becomes less fit for purpose as time goes by.

Horizon Three, in the present moment, is not fit for purpose. It is merely a collection of potential: potential flows, potential actors, potential infrastructure, potential institutions, potential paradigms and potential value sets. These are essentially fragments of potential change, representing multiple possible future configurations, or none.

As Wiebe Bijker reminds us, in the early stages of an emerging technology (and we can take this to include social technologies) there is considerable ‘interpretative flexibility’ between different groups about an emerging technology. A dominant interpretation “is gradually constructed in the social interventions between and within relevant social groups.” (Quoted in Curry and Hodgson, 2008/2020).

Preferred futures waiting for a moment

The route to Horizon Three from the present is one of alliances and alignments, but also one in which some proposed futures disappear from the discourse. And some H3 ideas remain in hibernation for decades, waiting for the right moment. The Citizen’s Income or Basic Income, now floating around a bit outside of the mainstream, was proposed by H.G.Wells almost a century ago.

So: in the Third Horizon, we see a set of possible configurations waiting to happen, a set of emergent properties waiting for the right conditions. It is a possible future that for some system actors is also a preferred future.

But in its purest sense, the Third Horizon should represent a space where a complete system transformation is proposed. This has implications for the time horizon: for some systems this takes more time than others. This is why the area of the Second Horizon becomes critical. Yes, it represents a transition, but it also a space of conflict between different models of the future. At any one time there are multiple competing Third Horizons, and multiple Third Horizon advocates, competing for the future.

Looking at an example

So let’s take an example. This is from a small project on weak signals on the future of land use, which The Futures Company undertook for the UK Government’s Foresight Programme fifteen years ago. (The futurist Wendy Schultz was one of the project’s expert advisers). The report is in the public domain.

From the scan, different groups of emerging issues clustered together, typically because as a group they started to configure a coherent system. (When as futurists we talk about a scenario being “coherent,” this is actually what we mean: that it describes, at least implicitly, a system that makes sense because it behaves in a coherent way).

These clusters were, in summary:

• “new industrial methods,” which covered “new approaches to production, whether of food, energy, or production materials”;
• “planning and housing,” about urban infrastructure and the ownership and use of land and housing;
• “production for resilience,” about a shift from a global view of food production and provision to one based on food sovereignty; and
• “the meaning of land,” which captured a group of issues which challenged the way in which land is understood culturally.

The first and fourth of these are summarised in the diagrams below.

Competing emerging systems

These different emerging systems were not equally attractive to all actors. The informal group that has developed Three Horizons has a language about this. “H2-” (minus) refers to a Horizon 2 adaptation in which the interests of the Horizon 1 actors are most represented in Horizon 2, whereas “H2+” (plus) describes a system in which Horizon 2 is most responsive to challengers who advocate more fundamental system change.

Looking at these land use clusters, for which the Three Horizons model was used as a method of analysis, the cluster of emerging issues around “new industrial methods” represented an H2- innovation system. It sat comfortably within the current systems configuration around land use, food productrion and food distribution, whereas the clusters around the other three represented an H2+ shift, requiring a radical reconfiguration, including a reconfiguration of values.

In terms of the standard Three Horizons diagram, Horizon 2 can be read as a “transition,” but in practice it is rather more than that. H2 is, at the least, a site of economic, political, and social struggle. In terms of complex adaptive systems, it is a zone where a complex system is likely to destabilise into chaos, that also creates the possibility of re-integration into new, vastly different configurations. One of the purposes of the Three Horizons model is to provide a framework which allows discussion and analysis of the contours of such conflicts, which often remain opaque or implicit.

Interpreting events

Through this, it effectively provides a tool for interpreting events. So, for example, the lobbying by utilities in many markets for solar producers to pay grid access charges over and above their net electricity tariffs can be read as an H2- intervention that is designed to shore up the existing system. In contrast, the decision by Barclay’s Bank to downgrade the credit status of American utilities is an intervention that promotes system transition, and can therefore be read as H2+.

Although the different Horizons are represented by different lines, the story they tell is of one system trying to match its external environment as optimally as possible. An ascent is a better fit, a descent is a worse one. But as Richard Pascale reminds us in his accessible account of business and emergence, Surfing the edge of chaos, organisations that discover they are losing their fitness with the landscape usually have to go down to go up again; they have to lose fit to reconfigure themselves and move to a new and better niche.

A system that is losing its fitness is, in effect, suffering from entropy: energy, of different kinds, is flowing out of it. To find a new position in another Horizon that is a better fit with its landscape, it needs inputs of energy, in the form of, for example, money, political capital, time, social engagement, or other resources. There is also a direct relationship between the amount of energy required to effect a system change and the economic cost of so doing.

In writing this I am reminded of a conversation that I once had with Tony Hodgson about a possible transition path in a set of 2 x 2 scenarios from one scenario to another. “You have to think of the lines between the scenarios as hills, not as boundary markers,” Tony said. They are the Pyrenees, not a county line. Effort is required to cross from one scenario, or one system, to the other. Similarly for the transitions between the different horizons in the Three Horizons model. They involve system shifts, and system shifts require effort.

Phase shift

It is possible to take this further, although it is stretching the Three Horizons model to do it, and possibly in a way that reduces its usability in workshops and other dialogue settings. One can imagine the shift from Horizon 1 to Horizon 3 as a “phase shift” between two systems, similar, say, to the transition from ice to water or water to steam, although the analogy is imprecise. More precisely, the shift is one in which the system unfreezes for long enough to reconfigure itself, before refreezing.

Like all metaphors, this one is incomplete. We can never be sure when or why “heating up” a system will turn it to water or steam; new H3 systems emerge partially, in an irregular fashion, often in niches that are shaped by location, culture, politics, and social structures (Geels, 2002). Sometimes the transition is only clear in hindsight.

Lock-in

One of the important and neglected characteristics of dominant systems is that of “lock-in,” or elements of the system that are self-reinforcing and maintain the stability of the dominant system. An example of lock-in: the large scale financing of American political candidates (of both parties) by the finance sector effectively preserves the dominant influence of finance over the outcomes of American legislative and regulatory processes.

Typically, during an H2 transition, it should be possible to identify ways in which such a lock-in stops functioning, allowing a new system to emerge and then crystallise. And equally: it should be possible to see the shape of the new patterns of lock-in that will stabilise a new system.

Finally, one of the other questions that Three Horizons raises is about the behaviour of actors in the system, and of their incentives. In general, this is a neglected area in much futures practice. There is some exploratory work that has looked at the connections between futures work and actor network theory (ANT) (Li, 2014, Dudhwala, 2011). It is also an important component in the frames of analysis of La Prospective. By sharpening our focus on the nature of systemic change, Three Horizons also requires us to think more clearly about the agents engaged in processes of change.

A version of this article first appeared in the Association of Professional Futurists’ newsletter Compass in January 2015.

References

• Curry A., and Hodgson A. (2008), “Seeing in Multiple Horizons.” Knowledge Base of Futures Studies, 2020.
• Dudhwala, F., (2011), “Opening up the future to inspection.” The 4th International Seville Conference on Future-Oriented Technology Analysis.
• The Futures Company (2009), Horizon Scan of emerging issues for the Foresight project on the Future of Land Use. UK Foresight Programme.
• Geels, F., (2002), “Technological transitions as evolutionary reconfiguration processes: a multi-level perspective and a case-study.” Research Policy 31 (2002) 1257–1274
• Hodgson, A., and Midgley, G., (2014), “Bringing Foresight Into Systems Thinking.”
• Li, Z., (2014), “Narrative Rhetorics in Scenario Work: Sensemaking and Translation.” Journal of Futures Studies, 18(3): 77–94
• Pascale, R., Millemann, M., and Gioja, L., (2001), Surfing The Edge of Chaos. Random House.
• Sharpe, B., (2013), Three Horizons: The Patterning of Hope. Triarchy Press.

This is obviously better than not filling in your blindspots. But the purpose of a scan is not to build a catalogue: that’s only a necessary condition of success. The purpose of the scan is to help you get to a ‘diagnosis’, in Richard Rumelt’s sense of the word:

A good diagnosis simplifies the complexity by identifying the critical aspects of the situation.

Systemic picture

In other words, you are building a systemic and dynamic picture of your futures landscape, in a way that enables you to make decisions about how to act. The reason I went back to Richard Slaughter’s article was because the six questions in ‘Mapping the Future’ allow you to do this:

1. What are the main continuities?

2. What are the major trends?

3. What are the most important change processes?

4. What are the most serious problems?

5. What are the new factors ‘in the pipeline’?

6. What are the main sources of inspiration and hope?

Continuities are about the idea that while the futures literature tends to stress change, “some things change very little from era to era… processes of change tend to be limited or conditioned by pre-existing realities.”

Trends—or driving forces, perhaps—are more familiar in the literature: these are substantial forces of change that are changing the landscape, often in combination with each other.

The worked example he gives in the paper includes a mix of major trends, critical issues, and strategies, from a paper called ‘World 2000’ by Halal. I’m not sure that this helps: I’d prefer to work through all six questions, and build the whole map, before getting to critical issues and strategies, which are then informed by the whole discussion that you’ve had to work through the questions.

Inflection points

Change processes might seem, on the face of it, to be the same as ‘trends’, but the way they are described in the paper makes them seem more like ‘inflection points’. These are things where something that has been part of received wisdom, and sits in the dominant worldviews, is starting to crumble. I think the paper could be more rigorous on this, but in the 1990s some of the examples he mentions are (from Lester Thurow’s work) ‘The end of communism’ and ‘A multi-polar world with no dominant power.

To this Slaughter adds a list called ‘ideas in decline’, about the industrial worldview. For example:

The view that idea is merely a thing or a resource

The idea of progress and unlimited material growth

Serious problems can be understood as issues that are deep-seated and which may prevent other types of change (this is my interpretation of the paper). I’m not sure that the examples in the paper help, but I think of these as being similar to Adam Gordon’s category of ‘blockers’—things that are locked into the system, often with strong reinforcing properties and large vested interests sitting behind them.

In 2022—my examples—I might locate ‘problems’ such as ‘global wealth disparities/ offshore wealth’ or ‘persistent inequality within and between states’ or ‘domination of the tech sector by a small group of large monopolistic businesses’ might come into the category of ‘serious problems’.

‘Industrial mindset’

In the article, Slaughter talks about the persistence of the ‘industrial mindset’—extractive capitalism, if you like. I suspect that there’s perhaps some overlap between the sub-category of ‘ideas in decline’, above, and ‘serious problems’, but that it might not make much difference in practice.

New factors represent the classic issues that are identified through emerging issues analysis. They’re not necessarily positive or negative. The examples in the paper include:

The human genome project and synthetic organ replacement

The development and applications of nanotechnology

(These examples, from the 1990s paper, also remind us how long it takes emerging issues to emerge.)

Inspiration and hope

Sources of inspiration and hope are essential to agency, and for me, these are similar to the idea of ‘seeds of change’ developed by the Good Anthropocene Project. Here’s their definition of those:

They can be social initiatives, new technologies, economic tools, or social-ecological projects, or organisations, movements or new ways of acting that appear to be contributing to the creation of a future that is just, prosperous, and sustainable.

In the paper, he gives examples that include ‘the notion of a stewardship ethic’ and ‘the re-birth of the sacred’.

The Three Horizons method hadn’t been developed when Richard Slaughter wrote the paper, but I wondered as I re-read his paper it Three Horizons could be used to map the six questions. It might look something like this.

Even more so, some of the oppositions that seem to emerge from the process might lead themselves to the dilemma resolution approach that Anthony Hodgson evolved from the work of Charles Hampden-Turner.

Rocks and whirlpools

Dilemmas often fall into the tensions between ‘rock’ qualities and ‘whirlpool’ qualities (yes, we’re talking about The Odyssey in this metaphor). Dilemmas are dilemmas because they have to be integrated—you can’t just choose.

Slaughter has a good example of this type of question in his conclusion:

to what extent, and how quickly, can powerful constituencies (governments, corporations, key decision-makers in all fields and enterprises) bring themselves to set aside the old industrial “game, worldview, etc. and develop a different outlook based on a new or renewed worldview oriented toward new ends; for example, a stewardship ethic; qualitative growth; more caring and inclusive human and economic relationships?

Resolving dilemmas

Dilemma resolution connects to Three Horizons, and in Three Horizons terms these are conflicts between ‘maintainers’ (in H1), whose goal is system stability, and ‘visionaries’ (in H3), whose goal is system transformation. We know enough about systems change to know that successful systems transition requires the skills of both—typically through the integrative skills of the ‘entrepreneurs’ who populate H2.

The dilemma resolution method comes with a set of steps that enable the social construction of an integrated outcome that goes beyond the usual organisational trade-offs or compromises when managing change. That sounds like a post for another time. But what I like about the six questions as a scanning tool is that it speaks to the interests and worldviews of all these actors.

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A version of this article is also published on my Just Two Things Newsletter.

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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.

What is the difference between a dilemma and a choice? A choice is just that; once made you can applaud it, or regret it, but it doesn’t have consequences. The road not taken in a choice is a memory, the stuff that poems are made of.

A dilemma, on the other hand, has consequences unless you resolve it. It is a dilemma because if you ignore one of the horns, it will overwhelm you later on. In one elegant version of this, it’s put this way:

If the advocates of one value get what they want in the short term, they don’t get what they want in the long term.

But there is an upside to all of this as well; if you do resolve them, you often find a creative path through to transformational innovation.

Darkened rooms

The idea of dilemma resolution was developed by Charles Hampden-Turner in his consulting practice, and the underlying idea is that organisations typically hold a number of dilemmas that they tend not to deal well with. His own practice involved identifying all of the dilemmas in the organisation, and then resolving them into one elegant systemic analysis, which would, frankly, be beyond the scope of most consultants. (I’m assuming there was an intermediate stage, unreported, that involved sitting in a darkened room staring at the wall until patterns emerged.) The International Futures Forum, largely though the work of Tony Hodgson, has taken Hampden-Turner’s thinking and made it both more accessible and more usable by others.

Horns of dilemmas

So what does a dilemma look like?

The visual representation is seen in the diagram at the top of the post. The horns of the dilemma are represented by the x– and y-axes. These represent a conflict that needs to be resolved, between two outcomes that are each essential to the organisation’s health and functioning. We are pulled between them. As Graham Leicester puts it in his book, Transformative Innovation:

We want both structure and freedom, or a job that gives us both money and meaning… One core dilemma is between focus and holism, between being for oneself and being for the whole. As John Cage expresses it in his Lecture on Nothing: ‘Structure without life is dead; and life without structure is unseen.’

And so the dilemma space has five outcomes, as seen in the diagram. Three of these are likely to kill the organisation; in a fourth it will likely muddle through, under-performing as it goes. Only the fifth space—the resolution—is actually a good outcome.

States of denial

Walking through them in turn, outcome #1, “the compromise zone”, is a state of denial. The first rule of the dilemma, in this space, is that you mustn’t talk about the dilemma. In the version of the diagram where each of the five spaces is represented by a creature, real or imaginary, this is the space of the ostrich, with its head buried deep in the sand. But it could also be the space of the elephant in the room or (in Paul Corney’s evocative phrase) the smelly fish under the table. Whichever it is, the organisation dislikes conflict and takes no steps to address either end of the dilemma.

In space #2 (“the conflict zone”), people talk about it all the time, but never resolve it. The dilemma is a rolling battle-line that sprawls across the organisation. Sometimes one side gaining the ascendancy, sometimes the other. The animal here is the pushmi-pullyu, although you have to have seen one of the several versions of the Dr Dolittle films to know what this is. (It looks like a double-headed llama, with a head at each end of its body.) The result is a series of compromises that produce outcomes that are below par. We’ve all worked in these organisations, where senior managers have a thinly veiled contempt for the worldview of their colleagues and skirmishes spill out across the organisation.

Dinosaurs and unicorns

But, actually, that is a better outcome than either #3 or #4–the “top-heavy zone” and the “lop-sided zone”–represented by a dinosaur and a unicorn respectively. These are mirror images of each other; they each carry within them the seeds of their own destruction. If you pursue one without regard for the other, you end up with a highly dysfunctional organisation. In short, two of these spaces are likely to kill the organisation, while the other two are not beneficial.

The thing is, all organisations have these dilemmas. The extent to which they resolve them is often significant in how successful they are. Dilemma resolution starts by naming the dilemmas and bringing them out into the open, which is a necessary first step.

Sailing

Hampden-Turner, who used a lot of sailing metaphors when first describing the dilemma space, describes one horn as a rock and the other as a whirlpool. Greek mythology metaphors may be the product of an Oxbridge university education, at least for an older generation, but as a metaphor it works well.

Dilemmas do often have an aspect that is fixed, and another that is fluid. The organisation needs to protect its revenue stream, but it also needs to reposition itself. Costs need to be kept under control, but quality needs to be improved. The company needs to grow, but it needs to be sustainable. And so on.

Quantities and qualities

The “fixed” horn of the dilemma therefore also tends to have a couple of significant characteristics. It tends to be embedded in the way the organisation does business (this is also true of non-profits) and therefore in its business systems and its business model. It is also, typically, associated with quantifiable metrics that are familiar to the organisation as a whole, and very familiar to those who advocate its importance.

The other horn, the whirlpool, is more associated with qualities that may be less easy to measure. Immediately you can see the type of organisational conflicts that will emerge, and the types of people who will be on either side of the divide.

If the advocates of either of the horns get control of the business the result is disastrous.

The ostrich is probably going to be quietly underperforming until the crisis hits; the pushmi-pullyu at least has the issue out in the open, but needs a different culture to resolve it. The only space where the horns have been reconciled—or rather, integrated—is the fifth space, represented by an eagle.

Both parts are necessary

There are excellent resources online that describe a process for doing this, but in a nutshell it is about first, respecting the importance of both of the horns of the dilemma to the continuing health of the organisation (and therefore also respecting those that hold either part close to themselves). This is because both parts are necessary. Going back to the start of the post, this is because it is a dilemma and not a choice.

The second building block involves identifying the values that sit behind each horn, and understanding what they bring to the organisation. And, therefore, why the organisation needs them.

Cost versus quality

There are, of course, some obvious, even famous, business dilemmas. Cost versus quality is one, which plagued the world’s automakers for years. Sustainability versus cost is another.

Because they’re famous, they have been well-rehearsed. We can draw out some lessons in how they were reconciled.

The cost versus quality dilemma was resolved by Edward Deming, a prophet without honour in his native America. His insight was that low quality has a much greater cost than the money saved during production; the cost of repairing or replacing a defective new car was huge, quite apart from the effect it had on reputation. Deming effectively reframed the of cost so it included more business units or actors over a longer time.

Sustainability, similarly: the costs look very different when you look at lifetime value rather than cost of acquisition or installation.

Short-term, long-term

It’s not a universal law, more a heuristic, but the “rock” tends towards the short-term health of the organisation, while the “whirlpool” tends towards its long-term health.

This is one of the reasons why much of the recent work on dilemma thinking has been done by people associated with the Three Horizons thinking, notably around the International Futures Forum.

Without re-rehearsing the whole body of Three Horizons thinking (there are plenty of other posts on The Next Wave about this), the reason that dilemma resolution is valuable is that it is a constructive way for the Horizon 1 managers, the Horizon 3 visionaries, and the Horizon 2 entrepreneurs to have a respectful and creative conversation about getting to that better place where the eagle flies. All of the alternatives are worse, some fatally so.

To learn more about Dilemma Resolution, I recommend the resources published online by H3Uni. There is a detailed description of the process, and a detailed facilitator’s guide.

This is a short book but it was 17 years in the making. It is at heart a practical history of the thinking and the practice of the International Futures Forum, which is based in Scotland, since its creation in the year 2000. By “practical history,” I mean that its author, Graham Leicester, who is also the director of the IFF, has focussed on explaining how the ideas and methods the IFF has used and evolved are applied practically to making change happen. The history and the light-touch theory happen along the way.

The International Futures Forum started life as a two-year project (partly funded by BP), with an invitation that went out to around 30 thinkers from a range of disciplines. They were invited to meet to explore the nature of the future challenges facing society, and the systemic connections between them; the ways in which society might successfully respond to those challenges; and to stimulate actions by communities, in Scotland and elsewhere, in line with the outcomes of that inquiry.

BP’s interest? It’s not mentioned in the book, but in part it was a response to criticism of the company about the adverse effects of its vast Grangemouth oil refinery, on the banks of the Forth estuary.

Systemic thinking

BP or no, who could resist an invitation like that, especially in the bright optimistic light of a new millennium? Those who accepted it, for example, included the biologist Brian Goodwin, the knowledge and information academic Max Boisot, and the writer and musician Pat Kane. The connection, between systemic thinking about problems, formulating responses, and engaging groups and communities to respond, has been at the centre of IFF’s practice, and this is reflected in the structure of the book, which is built around six themes: knowing; imagining; being; doing; enabling; and supporting.

In this short review, there isn’t the space to explore these in depth. In what follows, I will focus on a couple of areas where I think IFF’s practice is distinctive and different. But before that, it is worth sharing the SHINE project, which is something of a poster child for its work.

‘Don’t give up’

SHINE was about changing the way in which health and social care was delivered to older people in Fife, a largely rural county north of Edinburgh. It used the Three Horizons approach, of which more shortly, to develop a radical rethinking of the delivery of health and social care to its older population. In the first year, six people had moved to the new model; by the end of the second year, 50. These numbers were both well behind target, and many results-driven organisations would have impatiently killed off the project at that stage. In the third year, take-up accelerated to 500 people, and by year four, to 5,000. Graham writes of the project:

“Relationships are key to spreading, scaling and embedding… Doggedness is identified as a key enabler for getting this new approach embeddded: ‘we don’t give up’.”

Distinctive practice

Three Horizons is one of the distinctive practices of the IFF. It was largely developed by two of its fellows, Bill Sharpe and Tony Hodgson, and the IFF has pioneered much of the innovation around it.

For those unfamiliar with the method, it frames innovation as a systemic process in which the existing first Horizon loses fit with its environment, but there is competition for the new imagined Horizon Three system that might eventually replace it. Sitting between them are Horizon Two entrepreneurs busy prototyping and developing solutions that might act as a bridge to the future. In the book’s typology, it is part of the ‘imagining’ process in which people conceive, design and develop transformative initiatives.

Dinosaurs and crackpots

However, the IFF has deepened Three Horizons practice in two valuable ways. The first is by framing it as a dialogue tool to enable better conversations between different perspectives on the future. For example, it is easy for the H3 visionary to see the H1 manager as a dinosaur, and the H1 manager to think the H3 advocate a crackpot. Indeed, I have been in a workshop where an H1 manager used exactly that word about an H3 challenge to their worldview.

But more happens if these tensions are positively reframed: if the H1 manager sees the H3 visionary as a source of hope, or energy; if the H3 visionary sees the H1 manager as a heritage, or a well of expertise. Elsewhere, Graham has told the story of the NHS manager involved in the SHINE project who saw his role as ensuring that the existing system would give the new approach the resources and institutional cover it needed to grow.

This may be the same manager quoted in the book as saying, supportively as a word to the wise, “be aware that we have a black belt in taking promising organic initiatives and strangling the life out of them.”

The fixed and the fluid

The second way in which the IFF has deepened the Three Horizons model is through championing the idea of dilemma resolution, originally developed by the consultant Charles Hampden-Turner, and published in Charting The Corporate Mind. By doing this, Tony Hodgson has made usable some rich ideas that were previously too complex for others to apply. This has become a valuable adjunct to the Three Horizons model; it can provide a way to resolve the dilemmas in Horizon 2 between the very fixed demands of the existing Horizon 1 system and the fluid demands of Horizon 3 change, both of which contain essential ingredients for the new system that is emerging.

The other method I want to highlight here was new to me when I read the book, but it is a thing of delight. This is Jim Ewing’s ‘Impacto’ model, which is part of the Doing element in the story. It is a set of of questions that allows a group to describe their own path to a desired future.

They start with questions about purpose (the questions are all laid out in the book), and work through ‘urgency’, ‘destination’, and ‘success path’ to ‘commitment’. Ewing has discovered through his practice that the questions need to be asked in this order. It looks to be a straightforward and engaged way to develop a vision with a group or organisation, and although it doubtless comes with some wrinkles, I am looking forward to trying it for myself.

Human systems

In doing its work, the IFF settled on three essential principles in its initial years. The first was that you should take the “broadest possible view of the context, always thinking systemically”; the second, to think in terms of long term transitions; and the third, that the systems they were working with were human systems. The point about transitions has gone deep into its practice. The former California senator John Vasconcellos is quoted memorably as saying that the task of transition “is to be hospice workers for the dying culture and midwives for the new.” This is true of much, perhaps all, futures work, but we often neglect the importance of helping the old system die with dignity.

I should not conclude this review without mentioning the illustrations by Jennifer Williams, one of the IFF’s Fellows, which add to the book’s lightness of touch. I also found the brevity welcome, even when it left me wanting more information.

This a quiet and reflective book, and in both length and tone it is a refreshing antidote to the hundreds of over-excitable business books that are at heart vastly padded articles. When reading Transformative Innovation, you have a sense of the depth that sits behind every chapter. You can also pick up the tools and use them in your own practice, especially because the IFF, with its strong commitment to openness, has published much about them both on its own website and through an associated project, H3Uni.org. This rich and humane book should be on the shelf of every practising futurist.

‘Transformative Innovation’, by Graham Leicester, is published by Triarchy Press. This review first appeared in the January 2018 edition of Compass, the newsletter of the Association of Professional Futurists.

A shorter version of this post also appeared at the Tools for Hope blog.

An article in Stanford Social Innovation Review argues that it takes three types of leaders to make social innovation happen: the agitator, the innovator, and the orchestrator:

An agitator brings the grievances of specific individuals or groups to the forefront of public awareness. An innovator creates an actionable solution to address these grievances. And an orchestrator coordinates action across groups, organizations, and sectors to scale the proposed solution.

The article is by Julie Battilana and Marissa Kimsey, and a couple of things struck me straightaway about this model. All work on change has a theory of change embedded in it–indeed all futures work should have a theory of change embedded in it, implicitly or explicitly–and the theory of change here is very similar to the systemic view of change that underpins the Three Horizons model. Obviously I’ve written about that a bit on this blog, but just in case you have missed it, here’s the 60-second guide.

Figure 1: Three Horizons

(Image: International Futures Forum)
Working through the horizons in the usual way, Horizon One is the dominant or prevalent system today, typically run with a managerial mindset (“our job is to keep the lights on”). Like all system, its fit with its environment decays over time. Horizon Three is peopled with visionaries who have visionary alternatives to the present system (“electricity should be produced locally”/we shouldn’t be burning coal to keep the lights on”, etc), which may still lack effective models of delivery. Sitting between the two of them are the entrepreneurs in Horizon Two, who attempt to build delivery models that may be underpinned by different business models or different types of delivery mechanism or supporting institutions (“what if every user of light also produces power?”). These Horizon Two models are likely to be beyond prototypes but still living in niches. (Think of Tesla’s approach to EVs, for example).

Structural innovation needs all three

The second is that although they are writing about social innovation, this model applies to pretty much any kind of deep or structural innovation (Disruptive? Transformative?). You need all three roles; the authors think they might blur, but I’m not completely sure about that. Anyway:

Agitation without innovation means complaints without ways forward, and innovation without orchestration means ideas without impact.

And maybe one more thought. Large organisations are usually full of orchestrators, lighter on innovators, and go out of their way to persecute agitators. In fact, there’s usually a whole corporate lexicon to disparage them, starting with “cynical” and escalating quickly from there. I recall that Apple was said for while to have someone whose job it was just to ask questions, though I can’t find a link. That is a kind of agitator role. Mostly that tired and tedious managerial mantra about “Bring me solutions, don’t bring me problems” makes sure that no-one ever raises the challenging structural issues that might also be fruitful areas for innovation.

The article is fairly detailed, and discusses at reasonable length how each innovation role works–and what goes wrong when they overdo it. You don’t have to agree with all of this; for my money the trap the innovator is more likely to fall into is not having a narrative or metaphor that communicates their idea at a visceral level, and quickly. There’s also a useful summary chart showing how each of the different types of leaders use in different ways the kinds of skills that leaders typically deploy.

Figure 2: Leadership skills for social innovation

(Battilana and Kimsey, Stanford Review of Social Innovation)

Punctuated equilibrium

One interesting aspect of the argument is that in the case study the authors use, of the French youth service organisation Unis–Cité, the leaders started out seeing themselves as innovators, but had to switch roles to agitators when the political climate changed and it became necessary to make the public case once again for youth service. As the article notes more broadly, mobilizing for social change is an “inherently political process.” But we tend to think of Three Horizons as a process that works its way from the visionary Third Horizon through the entrepreneurial Second to the managerial First. Systemic change is not usually as tidy as that. In fact it usually evolves through the interplay of punctuated equilibrium and dynamic conservatism.

Punctuated equilibrium is a classic characteristic of systemic change. There are long periods of stasis where the Horizon One is held in place because of lock-in generated by the interplay of actors, social institutions, rules, social expectations and business models, but these are punctuated by periods of relatively rapid change when the dominant system evidently lacks fitness to its environment, and alternatives open up.

But the other half of that is dynamic conservatism: Donald Schon’s observation that all institutions adapt–in response to external or environmental change–by the smallest amount necessary to absorb the change. In practice influential actors adapt then push back again.

Three Horizons practice has something pragmatic to say about this. The International Futures Forum has developed a useful set of triads that characterise the the expectations that the different Horizons bring to conversations with the other two. When you look at the language around the negative one, immediately below, it is clear that these conversations are going nowhere.

Figure 3: Bad moon rising. Negative conversations in the Three Horizons

(International Futures Forum)
In contrast, in the positive version, underneath it, you can see scope for change. There are enough hooks in the dialogue to offer hope to everyone, and, importantly, respect for everyone in the system.

Figure 4: Long as we can see the light. Positive conversations in the Three Horizons

(International Futures Forum)

Reposted from the Tools for Hope blog.

Here’s the second of the interviews I recorded with the presenters at the Tools for Hope event in London in November. (The first one, with Wendy Schultz on visioning, is here).

At the event Bill Sharpe, the author of Three Horizons: The Patterning of Hope, co-presented the Three Horizons model with Graham Leicester, the Director of the International Futures Forum.  The IFF has been the leader, in terms of both practice and theory, in developing the application of Three Horizons thinking, and has also published some valuable resources.

In this interview they talk about some of the principles that sit behind the Three Horizons model, its use as a dialogue tool to negotiate change between different members of a system, and the health and social care project SHINE, in Fife, that has been something of a poster child for the application of 3H to create transformative futures. Golf gets a look-in too.

(Nine minutes).

I’m involved in organising an APF event in London next month called “Tools for Hope”. It’s a practical hands-on event designed to help people who’re interested in using futures work to create change. It’s being held in Bloomsbury on Tuesday 7th November.

The thinking behind the event is that futures work can create an overdose of pessimism as we stare at the overlapping crises of the “grandes problematiques“. But there’s a long if sometimes neglected history of futures methods that are designed to give people a sense of agency and purpose. So “Tools for Hope” is about futures tools that help people make change happen.

Speakers on the day include Wendy Schultz (on visioning), Bill Sharpe (on Three Horizons), Tricia Lustig (on appreciative enquiry), and Tanja Hichert (on Seeds of a Good Anthropocene).

• Wendy Schultz: “Preferred futures—visions—are a foundation of futures thinking, research, and practice. Starting with Polak’s Image of the Future, through organizational visions and transformational leadership as vision articulation, to the philosophical and artistic explorations of the possible preferred, visions and visioning are core to futures studies and foresight. How do we identify, collect, and compare ambient visions? What are all the approaches to creating fresh transformative visions? How can they act as nudges to emergence?”
• Bill Sharpe: “The Three Horizons framework is a simple tool for ordering our thoughts about the future. It works with an intuitive grasp of how the future occurs to us: a landscape of uncertainty in which we too are actors. If we can bring that intuitive appreciation to consciousness it is possible to work with the emerging future much more skilfully. In particular we can set about realising our own aspirations in a fast-changing and complex world.” In an interactive session Bill will introduce the framework and lead a Three Horizon mapping exercise.
• Tricia Lustig: “Foresight isn’t foresight until action occurs. Appreciative Inquiry is a tool you can use to make action happen. We will explore Appreciative Inquiry, an engagement and implementation tool which finds and captures the energy for change. We will talk about when to use it, and when not, share some case studies and experience an appreciative interview.”
• Tanja Hichert: “Seeds of a Good Anthropocene is an ongoing project with the aim to collect and develop a suite of alternative visions for “Good Anthropocenes” – positive futures that are socially and ecologically desirable, just, and sustainable. The objective is to counterbalance prevailing dystopic visions of the future that may be inhibiting our collective ability to move creatively towards a better trajectory for the Earth and humanity. This initiative is a collaboration between the Stockholm Resilience Centre, McGill University in Canada, and the Centre for Complex Systems in Transition (CST) at Stellenbosch University in South Africa.”

It’s a lovely venue and I think the event will generate a lot of energy. It’s being held on the day before the Anticipation conference opens in London.

You can register here. And the brochure can be downloaded from here: ProDev Brochure London17_Final1

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.

The books I chose are in the picture:

• Arie de Geus, The Living Company
• Bill Sharpe, Three Horizons: The Patterning of Hope
• Carlota Perez, Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital
• Richard Normann, Reframing Business
• Donella Meadows et al, Limits To Growth: The Thirty Year Update

Space for change

Obviously you can read the whole interview at Five Books, but when you have to explain what you do and why to an interested listener, they’re not the only person who’s learning; you’re also learning yourself. So I thought I’d mention in this post a couple of things that struck me.

The first is that both the first two books underline the importance of the connection between learning about the future and acting on it. “The purpose of looking at the future is to disturb the present”, said Gaston Berger. But futures work needs to create space for change in a way that connects these, which is one of the strengths of the Three Horizons model.

It’s easy to get into thinking ‘those first horizon people, they’re bad.’ You see innovation in horizon 2. But equally – as [Bill Sharpe] points out – you also need most of the Horizon 1 systems to carry on functioning. We expect to be able to get money out of the wall when you put a cash card into it. We expect the light to come on when we turn on the light switch – maybe not in all parts of the world but certainly in the UK. Even if you want it to change you have to have a way of changing without destroying what’s there at the moment. That’s a source of either systemic breakdown or, on an individual level, of nervous breakdown: I must kill everything that’s happening at the moment. That is not the way change happens in a productive way. And we know from lots and lots of historical examples that when change does happen in that disruptive fashion – you completely destroy the existing system – typically you get a lot of misery in the short term and then it replicates itself later on because it hasn’t changed, it’s just been killed.

Patterns matter

The second, thinking about Carlota Perez, and also The Limits To Growth, is that although futurists say, “There are no future facts“, and that futures work is not about prediction, there are recurring patterns which help us to consider, and to anticipate, the shape of change, and, indeed, the speed of change. The future is complex (and indeed is a complex system) but it is not completely random or entirely emergent. And those patterns of change include delays and feedback and so on, one of the critical lessons from The Limits To Growth.

At the moment we’re in an overshoot and collapse path, but the first thing is that they’re very clear we can change that, we can still change that now. The second thing is, when you talk to the technologists and the economists a lot of their models assume that things happen straight away. This is a system dynamics model, so it’s got a lot of delays, it’s got a lot of buffers. No matter how good the technology is – and we learn this from Carlota Perez as well – it takes time. Sometimes putting a technology fix in shoves the can down the road rather than fixing the problem. Sometimes it just doesn’t come in fast enough to solve the problem.

Given where we are – exceeding our planetary limits – this is probably the single most important futures book out there right now. For both the reasons that the core model is clearly reputable now – it’s proven itself over time – and also because it does have some observations about how we’d need to change to make change happen, to get out of overshoot and collapse. There’s a state in which you overshoot and oscillate, where you’re sometimes over the limits and sometimes under the limits, which gives you enough capacity to get back. We’re getting alarmingly close to the point where we don’t even have that option any more.

The corporate unconscious

And the third thought is about how much worldviews and mental models matter. One of the things I like about Richard Normann’s work is the way he links multiple perceptions of past, persent and future. And that led into an interesting discussion about the idea of the corporate unconscious:

He has this model of the conceptual past – and why he says conceptual past rather than the past is obviously because the past is a construction – the present (which is arguably a construction as well) and the conceptual future. This three-by-three model has the ‘everyday discourse’ other futurists talk about, but it also has unconscious thinking and the official story: the consciously extracted domain. He talks about the way in which you need to understand all of those things. It’s quite cerebral. But it fits with quite a lot of other futures. …

So, according to that model, you’re thinking about the individual unconscious?

Corporate unconscious as well.

What is corporate unconscious?

Companies always have a corporate unconscious. If you think about corporate culture, the classic phrase about corporate culture is ‘the way we do things round here’. But what tends to sit behind ‘the way we do things round here’ is a set of assumptions which came from somewhere, but nobody really knows where any more.

The whole interview is here.  The image at the top of the post is by Andrew Curry, published here under a Creative Commons licence.