Three Horizons: The Patterning of Hope

"I chose this book for a number of reasons and one was completely self-serving. I was part of the group that evolved the Three Horizons model . Originally it was developed by Bill Sharpe and Tony Hodgson, both of whom are friends of mine. It started being used for the first time in a piece of work we did for the British government on the future of transport – infrastructure systems – and out of that we started thinking about what it did as a model. There’s confusingly a Mckinsey model called three horizons, from the late 1990s, which asks managers to think about short-term, medium-term, long-term, and keep them all in their head at the same time. It was only when we researched the paper that we realised we were using somebody else’s name – by then it was too late. This is a systems model about the way things change. The first horizon is where things are now, in any area: whether it’s energy or finance or whatever, what the dominant practice is, the dominant institutions, the dominant models. The third horizon is what could change, what the future could be like. In the middle, the second horizon, you have an area of contested change: where you start seeing how the systems need to change if you’re going to go from one thing to another thing. Bill subtitles this book ‘The Patterning of Hope’, because he sees it as a tool to influence change. I’ve used it as a way of understanding the dynamics of change in sets of scenarios, where you’re not saying that any of these scenarios is better than any of the others, they’re all possible futures. There it helps people understand what would change if that scenario came about. So you start understanding who the actors are involved in change, what the institutional changes might be, what the regulatory changes might be, how long that might take. One of the very difficult issues in futures work is how do you get from a map of some possible futures – a set of future landscapes – to knowing what to do. One of the things that Three Horizons does is it gives you a relatively explicit way of knowing what to do. So as a tool it’s very attractive. It’s also very simple. When you draw it up on a wall with a group of people who are not futurists, not technically trained, and say this is the tool we’re going to use to understand the future, they look at it for about fifteen minutes and digest it, then they start using it. One of the powers of Three Horizons as a model is that people who are not skilled in futures work can engage with it quite quickly, they can use it usefully, they can create purpose from doing it. I’m a member of the Association of Professional Futurists , which is a relatively small international organisation. Amongst those members there’s quite an interesting body of work which is around personal futures. There’s a very good book by a man named Verne Wheelwright about that. He’s published all his workbooks online , to help people who want to do it. Being able to see how those bits of possibility might translate into something larger is valuable personally. Personal resilience ends up being a really important characteristic of the difference between people who survive and thrive and the people who struggle. I think some of that resilience comes from the sense that you’ve got more resources and more opportunities than you think you have when you’re stuck. It’s an interesting question, about whether you could use it to do individual futures, I’ll talk to Bill about it. He’s a technologist by background and when he left Hewlett Packard in Bristol he moved to West Wales because he wanted to be able to write more and think more. The book is called the patterning of hope for a reason, because he sees, and I don’t think he’s wrong about this, the most important thing about Three Horizons is being able to connect that sense of what can you change and how can you change it with where you are now. Where you are now is what’s stuck – what in the current system is stuck? And what in the current system is a possible route to change. He points out it’s easy to get into thinking ‘those first horizon people, they’re bad.’ You see innovation in horizon 2. But equally – as he 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. It’s a lovely model. I think of these books this is my favourite book and I think it has that same quality that Arie de Geus’s book has. It’s very warm. Humane’s the right word. It’s positive. It is very easy to get into futures and just think Mad Max and dystopias . But it is about what we do to change – that’s what futures is about: what can we do to make change?"