Three Horizons: The Patterning of Hope
"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  "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  "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   "It has been a privilege to work with Pierre Wack and Bill Sharpe in thinking about the future and turning it into action. Both understand visionary action planning at its best."   Napier Collyns, Co-founder, Global Business Network