Using the Three Horizons framework to support systemic design amidst a pandemic
By: Gemma Drake
Tags: Systems Leadership, Futures Thinking, Systems Thinking, Youth, Systems Change

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.

Kate Raworths video

[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.

Photo by James Wainscoat on Unsplash

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.

‘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.’

‘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.

Workshop Miro board

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: