TOWARDS THE THREE HORIZONS
We recently spent a wonderful afternoon filming with Bill Sharpe from the International Futures Forum, one of the leading exponents of the Three Horizons model which provides an interesting way of developing what Bill calls “Future Consciousness” to collectively deal with the unknowns lurking around the corner.
Bill lives in a remote Welsh coastal town on the far west of Wales, and I bet you can imagine the atmosphere as the wind was gusting and the rain sprinkling - Bill at work in his cosy house with its huge windows looking out over the sea, coming up with his far-reaching thoughts about how to rescue the future from chaos..
To quote from a paper by Bill :-
“There is a seeming paradox in futures thinking. On the one hand, it is quite difficult and not very common as either method or skill. On the other hand, it is a natural function of the mind and parts of the brain are dedicated to it, sometimes called ‘memory of the future’; we call this natural capacity future consciousness.
It promotes a way of thinking collectively that – it seems to me – would be absolutely perfect for things like Citizens Assemblies.
As a brief summary from a neophyte (I may not have fully understood all this but you can follow the link at the bottom!), essentially Horizon 1 is “Business As Usual”. At it’s worst H1 is the horizon of vested interests attempting to prevent outbreaks of a better future. At its best H1 represents the important effort to keep the ships afloat and the lights switched on as we move into the future and transition to better and more sustainable societies.
Horizon 3 is the long-term successor to the business as usual Horizon 1, and will usually be manifest in the here and now as pockets of fringe activity and thought. For me a really critical point to understanding all this is that today’s Horizon 1 will have historically been the domain of other peoples' innovations from the past.
At any given moment there will be a whole bunch of competing views for what the future should be..
And then in the middle we have Horizon 2, which is a kind of hodge-podge of all the attempts to build a different future and to respond to the changes in the world that are happening now.
All these futures compete with one another, and strangely somehow support one another too.. anyway, I had never heard of Bill, but his ideas are very influential and if you check out his book (published by Triarchy) you might see a video narrated by Kate Raworth summarising it.. (to give you a sense of just how influential Bill is!)
What’s really important about these ideas is that they provide a way of collectively thinking about the future – each horizon will be represented in peoples mindsets and they offer a way to take a helicopter view of things, to understand which horizons people are rooted in, their perspectives and intentions, and any entrenched views which will in turn facilitate collective discussion and decision making (rather than heated arguments!).
Which is why it seems so brilliant for emerging tools of enhanced democracy such as Citizens Assemblies.
This of course – as you might be thinking - has very little to do with the business of us getting solar panels on roofs right here, right now, in the Horizon 1 world in which we live.
But it has a tremendous amount of value as a model for reaching the Horizon 3 where every viable building IS a Power Station and that has become the new H1 norm.
But enough of my homework essays! If you are interested in reading more about the Three Horizons model there is a pretty good article by Bill here - https://www.h3uni.org/tutorial/three-horizons/ - which is a great starting point to begin exploring from.
And you can also pick up a copy of his book here - https://www.internationalfuturesforum.com/p/three-horizons-the-patterning-of-hope
