Anticipation in Three Horizons

Abstract

There is a widespread recognition that many societal challenges need responses that bring about transformational change in individuals, organizations, and institutions. For this, we need foresight approaches that can work with the intrinsic uncertainties of the future while enabling full engagement of our human capacity for creative response and learning. This chapter introduces Three Horizons as a practice that can help people to bring about change in the face of the complexities and uncertainties of the future. Experience has established that it can do this because each of the horizons captures a qualitatively distinct experience of the future in the present and these three perspectives taken together constitute a powerful expression of anticipatory capacity. The chapter proposes a synthesis between the practice of Three Horizons and the theoretical position that antici-patory decision-making requires a second-order paradigm in which the role and presence of the observer/decider is fully acknowledged. The anticipatory present moment is put forward as such a second-order framework, and it is shown how this achieves the synthesis. The theoretical understanding brought by the APM analysis supports the position that the horizons can be regarded as three founda-tional modes of human anticipatory capacity.