There is a flavour of Three Horizons already in the tendency to describe the journey through the pandemic in three phases:  from response, through recovery to renewal, for example.  Or, as others have it, ‘now, next, beyond’. Most of these three phase descriptions might just as easily be represented as three time horizons – short, medium and long term.  That is how the original Three Horizons framework made popular by McKinsey’s in the early 2000s was intended to be understood.

The framework becomes much more powerful, however, and more useful for anyone involved in the conscious pursuit of social change, if the three horizons are understood not as time horizons but as three qualities of the future in the present. The framework then provides a space to appreciate:  the unstable patterns of the past and the strains they are now coming under (H1), a sense of the opportunities for innovation and change that are accelerating all around us (H2), and also the potential for the present moment to act as a portal (to use Arundhati Roy’s language) to a very different future, founded on different values (H3).

There is always a dominant pattern.  This is the first horizon (H1), ‘business as usual’.  Its quality is managerial.  We rely on H1 systems being stable and reliable.  But as the world changes, or is disrupted for example by a pandemic, so aspects of business as usual begin to feel out of place or no longer fit for purpose.  Eventually ‘business as usual’ will always be superseded by new ways of doing things. 

The third horizon – H3 – emerges as the long-term successor to business as usual.  It grows from fringe activity in the present that introduces completely new ways of doing things but which turn out to be much better fitted to the world that is emerging than the dominant H1 systems.  Its quality is hopeful – full of hope.

The second horizon – H2 – is a pattern of transition activities and innovations, people trying things out in response to the ways in which the landscape is changing.  Its quality is entrepreneurial.  Some of these innovations will be absorbed into the H1 systems to improve them and to prolong their life (we call this ‘sustaining innovation’ or ‘H2 minus’) while some will pave the way for the emergence of the radically different H3 systems (this is ‘transformative innovation’ or ‘H2 plus’). 

The future emerges from the playing out of these three patterns of activity, the three horizons, over time. 

IFF has been using Three Horizons as a scanning framework to capture how these three patterns and the interaction between them is changing week by week during the pandemic in a number of sectors, capturing learning as we go. What are those at the forefront of the action noticing about the frailties and failings of H1?  What are the innovations springing up in H2?  What are the signs of hope that out of this crisis a better world – H3 – is possible?

Many assume that there will come a time, after the immediate response phase and as we enter ‘recovery’, when we will get to take a look around at what has happened and decide which changes to keep, which to discontinue, what to retrieve from the past that we need to revive and so on. The default set of assumptions underpinning those decisions will come from the past.  We may keep something because ‘it works’ – but all we know is that it might have worked in the past and did work in the pressure cooker environment of the crisis.  Will it work in the future?  Is it an aspect of the future we aspire to create?  Those are different questions.

In other words, without a sense of where we want to go, our own third horizon, we will inevitably – and largely unconsciously – privilege sustaining over transformative innovation.  We will not realise the full potential of this moment for significant change.

That is why it is important to notice the H3 activity already manifest in the present.  These are the actions that inspire and encourage us, give us hope, demonstrate that there are rich human values that can be expressed in heart-warming action.  These are the seeds of the future to which we aspire.  Bill Sharpe, in his book Three Horizons, calls H3 ‘the patterning of hope’. 

Scanning using the Three Horizons framework will give us a good picture of our starting position:  Where are we?  What is the nature of the landscape we are in and that we might encounter ahead?  And also, in the form of these glimpses of H3 in the present, a good sense of our direction of travel:  Where do we want to go?  What are the values we want to privilege through the transition?  What is the third horizon pattern we aspire to realise in the future?

IFF has developed a set of resources for guiding us through this journey of system transition in a time of great uncertainty and change.  It includes taking notice of some of the archetypal dynamics we are likely to encounter along the way, ways in which the three horizons often interact with each other over time.