Summary
Three Horizons is a futures framework that pictures change as three overlapping patterns, all present at once. Horizon 1 is the dominant system, ‘business as usual’, losing its fit as the world changes. Horizon 3 is its successor, visible at the fringes in what practitioners call “pockets of the future in the present”. Horizon 2 is the ground between, where innovations either prolong the old system (‘H2-’) or help the new one emerge (‘H2+’).
A three-horizons model first appeared in a 1999 business book. The futures version was set out by Andrew Curry and Anthony Hodgson in 2008 and in Bill Sharpe’s 2013 book ‘Three Horizons: The Patterning of Hope’.
Rationale
We used it: a strategy diagram on our About page sorts work by horizon. Its ‘H2-’, innovation the dominant system captures, is how efforts get “pulled back towards familiar ways of seeing and relating”.
Source: h3uni.org · CC BY-SA 4.0