Using the Three Horizons framework to support systemic design amidst a pandemic

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On the front line of systems change

11 min readDec 9, 2020

The pilot described below was co-designed and co-facilitated by Gemma Drake and Emily Bazalgette

To get the most out of this post, we recommend watching economist Kate Raworth’s short video explaining the Three Horizons framework.

This blog post illustrates and champions the value of using a systemic framework in long-term organisational thinking, alongside emergency contingency planning. I describe a pilot programme we ran May — August 2020, using Bill Sharpe’s Three Horizons model as a learning framework for future thinking with The Children’s Society’s executive leadership team during a pandemic. We reflect on why we chose the framework at that moment in time, how it helped us and what we’d do differently if we ran the pilot again.

We encourage others to use, modify and adapt this methodology.

A portfolio of experiments to respond to the pandemic

At The Children’s Society, and we have blogged extensively about our organisational learnings in response to the pandemic, you can read more about it here. We’ve also reflected on what the crisis has meant for our youth services, collaboration, how we’ve embraced digital tools and how the pandemic has accelerated the digital transformation of our services to young people across the country.

As quickly as possible, we’ve aimed to translate these learning activities into practical support for teams that have momentum and identify new opportunities to accelerate the organization’s impact. In practice, this meant we initiated a “portfolio of experiments” with stakeholders across the organisation.

One of these experiments was a learning pilot using ‘Bill Sharpe’s Three Horizons’ with our Executive Leadership Team, this is our most senior team of five staff including our CEO Mark Russell.

An opportunity to pause and dream

As this work started, The Children’s Society was about to embark on a strategy design process over the Autumn to collectively shape our 2030 vision and direction. We wanted to create spaces to pause and dream to help us move towards our future thinking.

Covid-19 has also opened up a fertile and generative ground for collaboration, hope and future thinking within the sector and wider society. For example, the RSA’s thought leadership on society’s response to the pandemic which explores ‘thinking like a system and acting like an entrepreneur’ to explore how change happens in context. Meanwhile Collaborate CIC used and adapted the ‘double loop’ change model, originally created by the Berkana Institute to frame their thinking on public and social sector renewal. We too were exploring how we would “bridge” that transition, into a deliberate future state.

Why Three Horizons? Why now?

Three Horizons is a sense-making framework that helps you think about the future and structure insights. It helps us explore patterns to identify what is no longer serving its purpose, how emerging trends can shape a viable future and what visionary action is needed to collectively move us towards a future. It was developed by Bill Sharpe and members of the International Futures Forum. In developing this framework for application within The Children’s Society, we learnt a lot from others. I’d encourage you to check out economist Kate Raworth’s video explaining the framework, which Kate Goodwin helpfully translated it into a guide for workshop use. Plus Goodwin’s valuable learnings in facilitating Three Horizons.

[If you have not watched the video yet, here is a quick summary.] The framework is understood through ‘three lenses’ or three horizons. The ‘y’ axis is what is “dominant or present”, the ‘x’ axis tracks time. Horizon 1, (H1, red) is the dominant or “business as usual”, it is our current prevailing system. This is where we are in now, and the qualities and characteristics of this horizon will decline over time. Horizon 3 (H3, green) is the “Vision of a Viable Future”, this is the future we envision. The ‘seeds’ of which are visible today, and over time will increase to become dominant. Lastly Horizon 2 (H2, black dotted line) this is the “innovations” which take us towards the Vision. These are the entrepreneurial and creative ‘disruptions’ which link our declining dominant with a viable future. It’s the dynamic space of change between H1 and H3 where it gets juicy!

In ‘The Patterning of Hope’ book Sharpe writes “Three Horizons is about developing a future consciousness — a rich and multi-faceted awareness of the future potential of the present moment.” It helps explore the interconnectedness of problems we face, makes clear the opportunities, and re-orientates us towards our future action.

Three Horizons has been applied in a number of contexts, recently at The Community Lottery Fund as part of sense-making sessions during Covid-19, in transforming Education in Scotland, in rural community development with the Carnegie Trust, and in healthcare transformation in NHS Fife (all from The Patterning Hope case studies.)

The goal of using The Three Horizons framework was “to create a transition idea” for The Children’s Society, one which would help us to successfully bridge from how we look now in 2020, to where we want to be in the future while surfacing the emerging patterns and needs of the organisation in the current ‘Covid-19’ climate.

Three foundational pilot ingredients

Firstly, this pilot was sponsored by Michelle Clarke, our new Executive Director of Diversity and Talent who joined the organisation at the start of the Covid-19 outbreak. An integral ingredient for the pilot was her buy-in and support for this work, which meant we could align the focus for the pilot to be about holding a space for learning and modelling this within our most senior team in the organisation.

Secondly, an external voice who can ask naive questions and challenge very directly. We brought in a critical friend Emily Bazalgette who had worked with our Executive Leadership Team prior.

Thirdly, acknowledging this was an ambitious framework and given we would be working virtually and rapidly we needed to test it first. We convened a group of colleagues, which included our design team and our National Operations Director Nerys Anthony. We framed this session as “it is not about generating perfect content or creating alignment, but to explore how the questions related to us — our past, present and future ambitions.” We learnt we had to simplify it and would need more time to familiarise the team with the method.

Seeing ourselves as a “system”

In preparing the team for The Three Horizons framework we articulated some “systems thinking principles” upfront to support how the leadership team viewed and experienced themselves as a ‘system’ of relationships interacting with each other. We defined a “system” as, “a group of individuals, interconnected, interdependent with a common focus or identity.”

One; ‘Everybody is right only partially,” a principle from ORSC coaching methodology, where ‘we are not looking for agreement fully but to hear from a diversity of voice and views in the system.’ We wanted different voices and perspectives to have permission to emerge from our leaders in the process.
Two; ‘The whole is greater than the sum of its parts,’ a favourite in our systems change language at The Children’s Society. That the system or team has self-perpetuating properties and wisdom of its own, that ‘we are stronger together.’
Three; ‘because of the self-regulating nature of systems, a change in one area of the system induces a change in the rest.’ Mindful of how the decisions our leadership team make will have consequences on the wider organisational system and the sector (those wider systems we play a role in.)

What we did

The pilot was four workshop sessions facilitated over a month held virtually using Miro Board. Time constraints meant we could only visit a few areas of the framework and our intention was to demonstrate the value of this way of thinking and hold a space for critical thinking in the lead up to organisational strategy work. The image below is the complete board from four workshops —we focused on areas of highest dominance in each horizon.

Horizon 1

We started by asking these questions: “What does ‘now’ look like for The Children’s Society?” From how we operate, our impact, our culture, to how a ‘young person’ might describe what we do?” We learned that we were most comfortable in H1, this is our dominant mindset. It was sometimes hard to separate aspiration from all aspects that make up the organisation today. We cycled back to revisit this question after visiting the ‘future’ H3.
We then went back in time on Horizon 1, we asked “Looking back, how did we get here? What values, cultures, laws, events led to our coming about today?” We learned we could have spent a lot of time here, after all, we are an organisation which is nearly 140 years old. To use our workshop time effectively, we pre-populated this area of H1 and sense-checked the insights as a group to add ‘what is missing.’
Travelling forward in time on Horizon 1 asks “What is in decline? What are we doing which is losing it’s fit for purpose?” We asked our leadership team to select two things from our dominant H1 to let go of. Given how Covid-19 has affected our circumstances, there was a shared sense of letting go of ‘centralised or London-centric office’ to flatten the ‘hierarchy’ and adopt more “flexible decision-making processes” in the future.

Horizon 3:

We asked “What is the future we want to bring about? In the eyes of young people, supporters and funders, how should The Children’s Society be exceptional, relative to anyone else?” The team selected 2040 as the “vision” for this horizon. Embracing the mindset of the visionary, we asked: “if we are a disruptive force in breaking down the cycles of disadvantage, what would we need to be?” There was a greater emphasis on shifting power locally into communities, youth collaboration and co-design being more visible in our governance, and taking on a more global view and less domestic mindset. We learned this was a place our team thrived exploring in, that the seeds of these ideas, lay very much in our present makeup.

Horizon 2:

This is where we focussed most of our time. Embracing the mindset of the entrepreneur to explore what is being ‘disrupted’ in the system. We experimented with different ways to bring in other voices to H2, by asking our leaders to ‘wear the thinking hat of…’ eg. ‘a network, a movement, a youth ambassador’, asking “what brave disruptions might they do?”
In all the areas we synthesised themes as a team to explore emerging patterns of thoughts and ideas. We closed the final workshop session with “small bets” asking our leaders to select a provocation from H2 which most inspired and intrigued them and to share an action on how they would make this visible ‘next Monday.’

What we learned about using the framework

It is a complexity framework, not a strategy framework. Its power is its non-linearity. We time travel back and forth, again and again, between multiple presents and multiple futures. It also gives us a snapshot at a point in time.
It’s not a tool for agreement, but a tool to surface the different views and voices in the system. It reveals assumptions and values, all of which are necessary for any process of change or transformation. It “allows you to have a more nuanced conversation. Bringing out new insights and allowing people to disagree for more interesting reasons” Kate Rayworth explains.
Practice with critical friends and use examples to illustrate the framework. We facilitated a demonstration of Three Horizons’ framework using the question “how does society show up for work.” This meant we had a dry run of the framework as a team and got familiar with the three lenses. I’d recommend ‘Three Horizons Toolkit’ published by Public Health Wales (24/02/20) which has some really good illustrative examples of using Three Horizons.
We used our voices as facilitators to wear different hats. To either ‘challenge’ or ‘encourage’, this enabled us to create a generative dialogue that was not just about the agreement, but about revealing assumptions, beliefs and aspirations behind what we do.
Flexibility. We also iterated workshop plans between sessions in response to the team’s learning and appetite and went where the energy was.
Impact lives on. Acknowledge that we might not know what the impacts are from this ‘thinking’ work until much later in the future.

Feedback from the leadership team

We need more time to explore it — days as opposed to hours. The balance between exploring the framework fully and “dancing with it.”
It was hard to facilitate virtually and embody this learning, all members of the team expressed how much it would have helped to have held these sessions in person.
The team valued the space to come together, to reflect, and use a new methodology to think critically together. “This thinking allowed us to see each other in different ways and helped understanding and team cohesion. I think spending time thinking about how we want to work together is really important.”

So what happened as a result of this pilot

Firstly, it opened doors for our design team and got critical design thinking into the heart of our 2030 strategy process, as a design team we are now represented and supporting many aspects of the strategy process.
Secondly, it validated culture of reflection. It was a great way for our senior leadership team to deepen approaches to critical thinking together. We had 100% engagement from each of our most senior leaders and CEO across the pilot. Given the pandemic, this was a HUGE and generous commitment!
Next, we are exploring where we think this framework has viability for other teams across the organisation and in the future in our work with young people. We’d like to revisit the framework periodically to sense-check our future direction as we travel through the next decade.
Building and iterating this further, we are currently exploring how a tool called Multi-Level Perspective could compliment the transition of the 2030 strategy process in our next phase of decision making. The Multi-Level Perspective tool was developed as a way of understanding the different levels at which change happens at “altitudes” or levels — the macro, meso and micro — of a system's structure, developed by Professor Frank Geels, 2007. Forum for the Future adapted the tool for handy facilitation use, described in ‘Stories of Change and it forms a key component in ‘Building Better Systems’, A Green Paper on Systems Innovation’ recently published by Jennie Winhall and Charles Leadbeater (October 2020.) I’d highly recommend reading this, it comes with a clear set of ‘framings’ for systems change, which we’ve been testing within our systems change programmatic areas and services.

Thank you

This work was made possible with the commitment, bravery and courage from our Executive Leadership team, sponsored by Michelle Clarke. Dara de Burca, Joe Jenkins, Liz Walker, Mark Russell.

Recommended related reading:

Bill Sharpe’s book of case studies in The Patterning Hope book and the IFF resources.
Kate Rayworth’s video explaining the framework
Kate Goodwin’s a guide to workshop use
Activate the Future, Three Horizons of innovation and culture change, Daniel Christian Wahl
Centre for Public Impact, Shaping the Language of Complexity
A Green Paper on Systems Innovation, (October 2020.)

Thanks to Emily Bazalgette, Nerys Anthony, Adam Groves for comments on this draft.