three horizons | Hinesight....for Foresight

by Andy Hines on July 3, 2024 Leave a Comment

Mapping archetype scenarios across the three horizons

I am so happy to be able to provide free access to our just published article in Futures: Mapping archetype scenarios across the three horizons. Futures has created a Share Link providing 50 days’ free access to the article, which you are welcome to read or download. No sign up, registration or fees are required: https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1jMPT3jdJop3o [pre-print here]

It was a pretty big research endeavor, that required pulling together a big team from the University of Houston Foresight program: I led the effort, assisted by Adjunct Faculty Adam Cowart, former Research Director Laura Schlehuber, and former students now alums Denise Worrell, Lavonne Leong, and Heather Benoit. You may have rightly surmised that a chunk of time has passed from when we began to publication!

Here’s the short story (I’ll write more next week). We kept noticing in our scenario work that when we used archetypes, the research team and the clients naturally aligned the archetypes in the same horizons: the Baseline in H1, Collapse or New Equilibrium in H2, and Transformation in H3. The figure below conveys that all archetypes exist to some degree in all horizons, but there is typically a dominant archetype in each.

We used this arrangement as a starting point for thinking about how a domain changes over time. It is certainly not a straight linear progression — we found loops, detours, and iterations – but over a long enough period of time the overall flow holds up pretty well. So, in this article we report on the investigative research we carried out to support this finding.

I am so proud of this team. It took a lot of work, and indeed the reviewers sent us back to the drawing board more than once, but the end product really looks nice to me – admittedly a biased view! Andy Hines

by Andy Hines on April 29, 2020 2 Comments

Three Horizons of After Capitalism

Here’s how After Capitalism is using the handy Horizons Framework. It is intended primarily to show the evolution of the concepts over time, and to provide a very rough estimate of timing.

The X-axis is time. (NOTE: Three Horizons does not prescribe timeframes for each horizon.)

The timing depends on the topic. Some topics change quickly (mobile communications) and some slowly (forestry). For After Capitalism, I pegged the current Horizon 1 (H1) system of Neoliberal Capitalism as having perhaps another decade of preeminence – to 2030. Then, the Horizons transition concepts that I’m calling Collaborative Sharing Platforms, which are already in existence to some extent today, become more prevalent. I am suggesting a decade or two for this Horizon Two (H2) transition – from 2030 to 2040/2050. These rough estimates suggest the Horizon Three (H3) is at least 20 or 30 years always. It is important to keep in mind that these are rough ballpark estimates.

The Y-axis is strategic fit, or how well is the horizon fitting with the context. The framework shows how the systems of each horizon shift over time.

H1, Neoliberal Capitalism, has the highest degree of strategic fit in the present, but is in decline by 2030 and fades away by 2040/2050.
H2, the Collaborative Sharing Platforms, has some degree of fit in the present, becomes preeminent in 2030, but it declines in the 2040/2050 timeframe.
H3, the three Transformation Images, have a low degree of fit in the present, pick up steam in H2 and eventually one, or some combination of them, becomes the new system in the 2040-/20505 timeframe.

Again, the years are just estimates! – Andy Hines

by Andy Hines on March 16, 2017 Leave a Comment

Geeking out on Three Horizons

Just finished Bill Sharpe’s Three Horizons: The Patterning of Hope, 2013. I often refer to a slide below as my “desert island” slide. That is, if I had one slide to explain the future, this would be it. It comes from Andrew Curry and Tony Hodgson, who wrote”Seeing in Multiple Horizons,” an article for the Journal of Futures Studies that I nominated for an APF MSFW award (which it won).

We have also incorporated three horizons language into our “domain description” template in the “Framing” step of Framework Foresight, in which we set the timeframe of our domain (the topic we are exploring). We also use the Three Horizons model to situate our scanning, as we label scanning hits according to which time horizon they indicate.

My initial introduction to the concept was to the McKinsey version in the Alchemy of Growth. When I took the job as Ideation Leader in New Business Development at Dow Chemical, I was handed that book and told to read it. One of my rules of thumb, “when in Rome….” so I adopted the Three Horizons language and model. It actually appeared in my 2003 article “Organizational Futurist Audit” as “Know Your Time Horizon.”

At this point you may be thinking, he likes this Three Horizons! Indeed!

So, that takes me to Bill Sharpe’s book. The background was useful, I hope, to illustrate how it has changed my thinking on the three horizons. My experience with the Mckinsey version led me to think of H2 as space of line extensions. H1 as the current product line, H2 as extension, and H3 as really new stuff. I don’t believe it is totally at odds with the Sharpe (and Curry and Hodgson) conception, but it is different. What the book brought home for me (and maybe I should have seen this earlier) is that the key transition is not from H1 to H2, but rather from H1 to H3, with H2 as a zone of transition. We move from H1 to H3, and H2 is “where tensions and transitions are played out between the continuous improvement of H1 and the transformative possibilities of H3.”

It can help us with clients to reframe H2 innovations as going somewhere else, so to speak. A neat concept in the book notes that some innovations are “absorbed” by the existing H2 system – what he calls H1 capture — while others take us forward to the third horizon — the h2+ innovations.

I found that distinction made the book worthwhile. It’s a short book, and as the title implies, there is a fair bit of it on the “hope” aspect. As a methods geek, I didn’t find that as helpful. And there are some case studies that some may find useful as well. I’m very happy to have read it and it’s making me think about how it fits with our interpretation of the archetype methods. Hmmmm. Andy Hines

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by Andy Hines on November 25, 2015 Leave a Comment

Three Horizons of Work

I had the pleasure of participating on a panel exploring the future of work at the GAO for IFPTE Local 1921annual union meeting. We had ten or fifteen minutes to talk – quite a challenge given all the interesting things happening in the future of work. I decided to organize it around the Three Horizons Model (see Curry and Hodgson’s wonderful paper).

I selected three issues, going from the long-term to the short.

(Horizon Three) The transformation of work. Work is going through a transformation, as three driving forces — the rise of automation and machine intelligence, shifts in individual values, and the rise of a new economy – are challenging key assumptions about the role of work are being challenged: (1) work is central to individual’s identity (2) work structures daily life, and (3) work is the primary source of income.

(Horizon Two) Hey, that’s cheating: Augmentation in the workplace. Augmented or enhanced human characteristics will present challenges for organizations and individual talent. Significant technology advances, from mechanical implants to chemical, genetic, and nanotech-enabled approaches, are making human augmentation a reality.

(Horizon One) Fairness becomes impossible. The need to customize and personalize to attract talent will make across-the-board, same-for-everyone types of policies increasingly untenable. The high premium on getting the right talent shifts the bargaining power to them, and they will use it.

It was great fun to share and discuss, and to sneak in a very useful foresight framework. Andy Hines

by Andy Hines on December 9, 2021 Leave a Comment

Purposes of Foresight work and Time Horizons

What are the purposes of foresight work? Back in 2009 futurist Richard Slaughter attempted to answer that question by classifying several hundred foresight works globally by the three interests or purposes.

Pragmatic: doing today’s work better
Progressive: moving beyond today’s practices
Civilizational: creating the foundations of the next world civilization

Perhaps it was no surprise that most work was in the pragmatic category, followed by progressive, and the least amount of work being civilizational. A key objective of his futures work has been to encourage more progressive and ideally more civilizational foresight work. When a member of the original research team, Chris Riedy revisited the work (as part of Knowledge Base of Futures Studies 2020), he did not see a significant shift in the purposes of foresight work, although he did cite several positive developments in the field.

It occurred to me that these purposes align with the popular Three Horizons framework. The figure suggests the alignment as follows:

Pragmatic work will most typically be in Horizon 1, the current system.
Progressive work will most often be aimed at Horizon 2, the zone of transition.
Civilization work seeking to create a new system will most commonly be aimed at Horizon 3.

Rather than an exclusive focus on one purpose or another, perhaps our project work engages all three? Futurists mostly focus on exploring horizons 2 and 3, but our recommendations will engage horizon 1 as we tie the future to the present. And we will also engage multiple horizons within a project, touching on all three purposes. We may encourage clients to stretch their thinking by engaging H3, extend their thinking in H2, as well as pragmatically consider what needs to be done in H1. — Andy Hines

by Andy Hines on January 5, 2021 2 Comments

Scenario archetypes across 3 horizons

When we explain our four archetype scenarios, often someone will ask whether there is a pattern in how the four archetypes unfold, i.e., is there a typical progression or order? My response has been – we think so, but we can’t prove it. Finally, we’re going to try! My students Lavonne Leong, Monica Jamaluddin, and Heather Benoit are taking the plunge with me.

In our core Framework Foresight process, when we get to alternative futures/scenarios, we use four archetypes as shapes or patterns of change that can be used to map the future of any domain.

We start with the baseline future (aka Continuation) that projects the current system, or way of doing things, forward without any major disruptions of surprises. This is of course Horizon 1 (H1).
We finish with the transformation future, the new system that eventually replaces the old baseline. This is Horizon 3 (H3).

To recap, we have the baseline as Horizon 1 and transformation as H3.

So, how do get from H1 to H3? Via the Horizon 2 (H2) zone of transition. Our starting hypothesis is that there are two major types of transitions from H1 to H3.
- Collapse: the baselines systems fall into a collapse or highly dysfunctional state, which eventually leads to its replacement by a new system (the H3 transformation)
- New equilibrium: the baseline is challenged or disrupted and responds to “save itself.” It is frightened by potential magnitude of H3 transformation change, and makes as little change as possible as it seeks to maintain the integrity of the current baseline system. This is a more gradual approach to H3 transformation, in which the New Equilibrium scenario is a gradual transition space on the way to eventual transformation.

Foe example, in the graphic, we start with the baseline of Good to Go in H1, and eventually get to New Frontier in H3. But does it go via H2 Breaking Orbit, which follows New Equilibrium, or does it go via H2 Failure to Launch, which is the collapse archetype?

The research will involve identifying domains that have historical sets of scenarios that we can track and see if or how they mapped to the archetypes and the three horizons. For instance, if we go back twenty years and look at a set of scenarios that projected on the future of work, and compare it to how the future of work actually unfolded. Did it follow the archetypes? Did it move along the three horizons? Did it unfold via archetypes that follow along the three horizons? (jackpot) — Andy Hines

by Andy Hines on August 28, 2024 1 Comment

Mapping Archetypes and After Capitalism

More from our “Mapping Archetype Scenarios Across the Three Horizons” research. Today, we look at how to apply it. Conveniently, we have the After Capitalism research, which is a domain for which we are looking ahead to the long-term future.

“Mapping Archetypes” starts with the Baseline that describes the current system in Horizon 1 (H1). In this case, we called it Neoliberal Capitalism. For the Horizon 2 (H2) transition zone, we will typically have one Collapse and one New Equilibrium scenario. With After Capitalism , I chose variety over specificity. Obviously, the scope of After Capitalism is huge and is open to many variations. Since the major purpose of that research was to identify the H3 Transformation scenarios (which I refer to as “guiding images”), I treated the H2 scenarios relatively lightly. Rather than do the depth of research to put together one integrated scenario for each H2 archetype, Collapse and New Equilibrium, I chose instead to sketch some interesting alternatives.

For Collapse, I simply focused on the “mirror image” of each H3 Transformation guiding image.

Overshoot is the Collapse version of Circular Commons.
Class War is the Collapse version of Non-Workers Paradise.
Rogue AI is the Collapse version of Tech-Led Abundance.

For New Equilibrium, the scenarios emerged from the decline of the H1 Neoliberal Capitalist Baseline as potential stepping stones to Transformation, but, of course, don’t quite get there. They sorted on a continuum between H1 and H3:

New Sources of Value was closest to the H1 Baseline in that it maintains the capitalist structure, but the nature of value creation shifts.
In between H1 and H3, Collaborative Sharing Platforms have one foot in the Baseline and one foot in Transformation – think in terms of Uber as an example, a new way of transporting people but ultimately the same old capitalist business model.
Closest to H3, Sustainability Transition is comprised of concepts that originally were part of what became the H3 Circular Commons guiding image, but were ultimately judged to be not quite transformative enough.

Finally, of course we have the three H3 Transformation scenarios, aka guiding images. We typically do two scenarios, but in this case these three clearly emerged from the research.

Circular Commons expands the concept of sustainability to embrace circular principles as part of a social, political, and economic commons.
Non-Workers Paradise is a play on the attributed-to-Marxist idea of a worker’s paradise, but in the After Capitalism world we are not working in paid jobs as a means of sustenance.
Tech-Led Abundance sees technological progress drives and leads to an abundance of wealth that fixes the core distribution problem of capitalism.

What the research suggests is that as the H1 Baseline decays, the domain will move into H2 by one of two routes: Collapse or New Equilibrium. As we discussed in a previous post, Collapse appears to be much less common than we think. In the book, independent of this new mapping research, I had advocated an evolutionary rather than revolutionary approach. In” Mapping Archetype” terms, I was suggesting a New Equilibrium that was gradual would be more favorable than a burn-it-down Collapse and rebuild.

This approach provides a very handy foundation for thinking about the long-term future and helps to set reasonable expectations for what the journey might look like. It will be interesting to watch the pathway unfold. – Andy Hines

by Andy Hines on July 16, 2024 1 Comment

Is Collapse the Most Common Pathway to Transformation?

I promised more from our Mapping archetype scenarios across the three horizons research (still free at https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1jMPT3jdJop3o). Let’s geek out a little bit. I will answer the question if you’ll hang in there and let me explain.

Table 6 summarizes the results of where our 78 scenario set pathways “ended up.” What that means is for the 78 historical sets of scenarios that could be fitted to archetypes, we assessed how the domain the scenarios were describing actually was tracking along the three horizons.

Hines, A., Benoit, H., Leong, L., Worrell, D., Schlehuber, L. and Cowart A. 2024. “Mapping Archetype Scenarios across the Three Horizons.” *Futures*, Published online, July 2, 2024.

Quick refreshers:

If a domain was best described at projected timeframe by the Baseline archetype (B), we said it was in Horizon One (H1). So a if a scenario set done in 2000 had a 2020 timeframe, we assessed where the domain was at in 2020.
If a domain was best described by either Collapse (C) or New Equilibrium (NE), we assessed it was in H2.
If a domain was best described by Transformation (T), we assessed it was in H3.

One more set-up point. We hypothesize there would be two primary pathways for domains that made it all the way to H3 Transformation.

Baseline > Collapse > Transformation (B > C > T)

Baseline > New Equilibrium > Transformation (B > NE > T).

The percentages/raw numbers for domains that ended up in the Baseline, Collapse, and New Equilibrium, which seems reasonable (we were a little surprised by how many were stuck in the Baseline). The team was initially concerned that only 9 % made it to Transformation. The simple explanation for that low percentage was that Transformation would be the archetype most affected by the fact that many of the scenario sets had not yet reached their time horizon. Since Transformation is the furthest in time from the present, it makes sense that it needs more time to materialize.

The exceptions are noted in the bullets in the table. For example, there were 26 domains that were still in the Baseline. Of these 26, three fit a combined Baseline/ Collapse archetype

A key finding is that of the seven domains that made it to Transformation, five were via the NE loop, one was judged to be in-between Collapse and New Equilibrium, and one went from Baseline straight to transformation. In short, Collapse is NOT the most common — or apparently even a common — pathway to Transformation. Interesting! (Of course, more work is to be done here.)

I’ll confess that I – and the team – had guessed beforehand that B > C > T would be the dominant pathway. The line of reasoning was that only in crisis do we gather up the will for real change. Oops. We noticed the NE pathway involved multiple loops. But what does happen after Collapse? A juicy question for further research! – Andy Hines

by Andy Hines on July 10, 2024 Leave a Comment

After Capitalism: How Might We Pay for It?

Followers of After Capitalism are familiar with concepts such as post-work, UBI (Universal Basic Income) and UBS (Universal Basic Services). In a Horizon 3 Transformation future, these types of concepts are in play. The number one objection: how are we going to pay for it? (Admittedly, this question comes up with Horizon 1 and Horizon 2 ideas as well.) Allow me to provide an outline of how to respond. Think in terms of three phases (yep, you could align these with the Three Horizons).

Phase 1 – Use taxes to start redistributing wealth.

Okay, we lose a lot of people here. But we have to acknowledge the hard truth that is central to After Capitalism. The obscene inequality in capitalism cannot continue. It requires some form of redistribution. Right now, people are used to paying taxes, so that’s a place to start. For example, if we wanted to move to free public transportation as a step toward Universal Basic Services, we could raise the gas tax, move to congestion pricing, or the like; free public transportation would clearly be a bigger benefit to the poor, thus we’ve done a little redistribution.

Phase 2 — Automation to reduce costs over time.

This suggests we start strategically investing in automation now – and this is VITALLY important – as part of a post-work vision. Automating people out of jobs today is cruel, because jobs are vital to survive in today’s context. But if we have a vision and strategy of post-work, automation is a valuable tool. Keep in mind that with automation, the work is still being done, and the wealth is still being produced, so there are resources available for people even if they aren’t working. In our free public transportation example, we might move to fully automated ridesharing.

Phase 3 – People still “work” in post-work, but they don’t have jobs.

We still have tasks to carry out and things to do. I only half facetiously suggested we would have “everything” to do in post-work; maybe growing food, participating in civic life, learning new things, fixing our sidewalk, doing-it-ourselves on a large scale. In our free public transportation example, maybe someone who likes doing mechanical work volunteers to do the maintenance and report on the vehicles.

Sure, very high level … The whole premise of After Capitalism is first we have to have a sense of where were want to go, then we can dig into the details of how to get there. – Andy Hines

by Andy Hines on August 8, 2023 2 Comments

Why Societies Collapse from Jared Diamond

Our preliminary research at Houston Foresight into how domains evolve over the Three Horizons suggests collapse is not the typical route to transformation; rather a gradual iteration of new equilibria appears to be more common. Yet it is almost conventional wisdom that crisis is the key enabler of transformational change. Perhaps it is our understanding of collapse that is misinformed? So I decided to take a look at some of the collapse literature and see what might be learned as we start to dig into paths to After Capitalism.

Diamond, the author of Pulitizer Prize winner Guns, Germs, & Steel (one of my all-time favorites), followed it up with Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Success, which is spot-on for our Collapse series.

He pulls no punches. Collapse is not some sort of romantic mystery, but rather pretty straightforward and often resulting from environmental problems not dissimilar to ones we face today. Gulp! Take a look at this progression on the road to disaster:

1) failure to anticipate a problem before it arrived

2) failing to perceive a problem that has arrived (a boiling frog phenomenon)

3) failure to even attempt to solve a problem after it is perceived (either because the status quo is good for some, or more irrational motives such as values, religion, groupthink or denial).

4) difficulties solving the problem once its identified (it’s too hard, too costly or too late).

Dare I ask where you think we are?

The book goes through several historical case examples. He observes that some perceived “romantic mystery collapses, such as Easter Island and the Anasazi, were really self-inflicted ecological suicides.For a contemporary example, (he was writing in 2005), he cited the example of Montana. He noted that if Montana were an isolated country, it would have been in a state of collapse. It had been one of the wealthiest states in America based on copper mining, forestry and agriculture. Then it became very poor. Mining was gone, leaving behind terrible environmental damage, and logging and farming were also in decline. 70% of the children in Montana were on food aid. Montana had terrible forest fires, salinisation, erosion, weeds and animal diseases. These kinds of problems were faced by some countries at the time, such as Afghanistan and Pakistan, but the reason Montana didn’t collapse of course is that it was embedded within a rich country.

So what are the key factors behind collapses?

Environmental damage, inadvertent damage to the environment through means such as deforestation, soil erosion, salinisation, over-hunting etc.
Climate change, such as cooling or increased aridity. People can hammer away at their environment and get away with it as long as the climate is benign, warm, wet, and the people are likely to get in trouble when the climate turns against them, getting colder or drier. So climate change and human environmental impact interact, not surprisingly.
Relations with hostile neighbours. Societies can fail to hold off the hostile neighbours when the society itself gets weakened for environmental or any other reasons, e.g., barbarians and the Roman Empire.
Relations with friendlies. The friends of a society can run into environmental problems and collapses for environmental reasons, that collapse may then drag down their trade partners.
People’s cultural response. Why did some peoples perceive and recognise their problems and others not? See the 4 factors on the road to disaster above.

A final interesting observation is the insulation of the decision-making elite from the consequences of their actions. That is to say, in societies where the elites do not suffer from the consequences of their decisions, but can insulate themselves, the elite are more likely to pursue their short-term interests. Think rich people living in gated communities and drinking bottled water.

In sum, Diamond’s work suggests the possibility of Collapse is very real. In a later talk, he observed that historically, collapsed societies could be bailed out by others or move – if the planet collapses …. – Andy Hines

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