Three Horizons

Bill Sharpe

Description

A practical framework for thinking about the future... and an exploration of 'future consciousness' and how to develop it

Sujets

• Sociologie, société et politique

Informations

• Publié par: Triarchy Press
• Date de parution: 16 juin 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781911193876
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

First published: 2013
Second edition: 2020
Published by:
Triarchy Press
Axminster, UK
www.triarchypress.net
Copyright © International Futures Forum, 2013 and 2020
The right of Bill Sharpe to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including photocopying, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBNs
Print: 978-1-911193-86-9
ePub: 978-1-911193-87-6
PDF: 978-1-911193-88-3
Artwork by Jennifer Williams
Jennifer Williams is critically acclaimed at making hand-made books, cut-outs, photographs, illustrations, prints and puppets. She is a trustee and member of International Futures Forum and for 31 years directed the Centre for Creative Communities.
Contents
Reviews of the First Edition
Introduction
PART I: T HREE H ORIZONS
A Heated Conversation
The Future in the Present
The Three Horizons
A Shared Future Consciousness
PART II: T HE P RACTICE OF F UTURE C ONSCIOUSNESS
Seeing Everything as Patterns
Putting Ourselves in the Picture
Convening the Future: From Mindsets to Perspectives
PART III: J OURNEYS IN T HREE H ORIZONS
Case Studies: Introduction
Case Studies
Case Studies: Summary
Pushing out to Sea
PART IV: T HE P ATTERNING OF H OPE
Knowing and Living
Stepping into Future Consciousness
Hope
Transformative Society
Navigating on the Open Sea
Acknowledgements
Notes
Bibliography
REVIEWS of the First Edition
How can an eclectic group of experts, with very different worldviews, come to a shared vision for the future? Using the Three Horizons framework, skilled facilitators achieved the seemingly impossible and enabled the Carnegie Commission for Rural Community Development to agree a compelling, inspiring and hopeful blueprint for the future of rural communities. Now Bill Sharpe reveals the full potential for this way of thinking to generate practical hope in all kinds of complex policy areas.
Kate Braithwaite, Operations Director, UnLtd and formerly Carnegie UK Trust
Every so often a new futures method comes along that opens up new ways of seeing the future. Three Horizons is such a method. It links the present to possible futures and embodies ways of identifying strategic and innovation challenges. Bill Sharpe, one of the Three Horizons pioneers, has written a valuable primer on its theory and emerging practice.
Andrew Curry, The Futures Company
Three Horizons provides a valuable tool for understanding the complexity hidden in past trends and the choices always implicit in the apparent determinism of future possibilities. An intelligent approach to seeing into the future demands both insight into the underlying forces driving surface events and the imagination to know that what appears self-evident may be only the result of a pattern of logic that fails to take fully into account the future play of those forces. Bill Sharpe’s book helps us break out of the Newtonian deterministic thinking that so often blinds us to the choices we have made and reveals our power to alter them.
Garry Jacobs, Chairman and CEO of the World Academy of Arts and Sciences
We need to pass from worrying about the future to constructively engaging upon its creation. For all those interested in this task, this book delivers a powerful way of thinking about that future in qualitatively different horizons. If we want transformation to be more than just an aspiration, then we need to position it and to understand the dilemmas that define progress towards a better society. This book helps with that positioning and puts discipline into the process of foresight.
Professor Peter Kawalek, Manchester Business School
…we encourage occupational scientists to embrace the Three Horizons (Sharpe, 2013), a simple and intuitive framework for thinking about the future and how to bring about positive change.
Developed over several years by members of the International Futures Forum, this framework creates an awareness of the future potential of the present, a “future consciousness” (Sharpe, 2013, p. 8), enabling a mindset to create a future that society needs and wants.
… The Three Horizons framework has been used effectively by various groups to create transformative change and innovation (Sharpe, 2013, pp.65–85). According to Sharpe, transformative change results from re-patterning the way people do things rather than merely extending current patterns. Given the nature of the wicked problems impacting on population health, we believe occupational scientists need to investigate ways and means of initiating transformative change as their contribution to research on the uncertain future that lies ahead. We believe that to tackle wicked problems such as climate change, occupational scientists and others need to do research differently and re-conceptualise the future. The Three Horizons framework can assist in enabling members of research teams to start conversations about innovative ways of creating a transformed future."
Dr Alison Wicks and Dr Maggie Jamieson in Journal of Occupational Science
Three Horizons is more than a tool to describe the Litany of change. It’s also a way to surface different perspectives on an issue in a very overt way, and to move beyond those seemingly intractable perspectives to collaborative ways of thinking about possible futures, or ‘holding transformational dialogue which informs our action in the complexity of the present while respecting the unknowability of the future…
Like all frameworks, the Three Horizons is only useful and relevant if it fits the context in which one is working and living. So far, I’ve found it useful in different ways in client contexts and in my own scanning as a way to map out the scope of change being faced. The Three Horizons is not just a tool for understanding change and transformation though. It’s also a way to understand the power of intent and hope—individual and collective—as we look towards the future.
And like all things transformational and developmental, once the Three Horizons is understood and embedded in thinking and working, there’s no going back."
Maree Conway, Founding Partner: The Centre for Australian Foresight, writing in The Association of Professional Futurists’ Compass Newsletter .
‘Three Horizons: The Patterning of Hope’ by Bill Sharpe is a tremendous book for anyone who works on profound change. …My key takeaway: rather than aiming for distant, definitive visions, we would be better to act from a shared awareness of the future potential in this present moment.
Last autumn I read ‘Three Horizons’, at the suggestion of Forum for the Future’s Director of Futures, James Goodman. Thank goodness I did. Few books have resonated with me as much on the overwhelming messiness of profound, social change. In a time of Trump and Brexit, and of us still driving climate change even though we are putting civilisation at risk, it gave me hope and it gave shifted my modus operandi.
David Bent, Social entrepreneur and consultant to the UK Cabinet Office
I NTRODUCTION
Over the last few years I have found myself in many discussions with people who are wrestling with problems of daunting complexity. Sometimes, when tasked with producing a report, I would struggle to find a way to write something that was both useful and which respected our collective ignorance of what to do. Gradually it has dawned on me that we lack good ways to work with unknowing, to respect lack of knowledge but work skilfully with it. All the tools that make up the field of futures and foresight work – and that should be appropriate for this task – seem to fall short. We don’t even have a good word for not knowing – ‘ignorance’ certainly doesn’t do it, suggesting as it does that we haven’t taken the time to find out what we could. If I asked for good things to read about ignorance, people laughed.
I slowly came to realise that, in the emerging practice of Three Horizons, we had discovered something useful. Here was a simple framework that seemed to allow us to work with what we know at the same time as engaging creatively with what we do not know. Instead of having to build afresh, for each new project, a way to think about the future, we had in our hands a simple way to structure the discussion that would hold the complexity in a productive way and enable us to work with it. More than that, it allowed us to work with our own response to the challenge, to come together in exploring our visions, to make of hope not only an individual capacity not to give up, but a way to respond with creativity towards the not yet known.
Three Horizons is a way of working with change; it is a foresight tool. It is helpful for this because of the way it naturally turns towards systemic patterns rather than individual events or unexamined trends; it frames our discussion in terms of the shift from the established patterns of the first horizon to the emergence of new patterns in the third, via the transition activity of the second. Beyond this orientation to patterns, the central idea of Three Horizons, and what makes it so useful, is that it draws attention to the three horizons as existing always in the present moment, and that we have evidence about the future in how people (including ourselves) are behaving now . By making these qualitative distinctions between the three horizons in the present, a lot of dynamics of change come into view quite naturally, and we are led to explore them in terms of the patterns of behaviour of those who are maintaining or creating them. This leads to the third benefit, that we can reflect on our own intentions towards those patterns in the process of exploring the behaviour and inte