In the last few months I have delivered more and more sessions to help companies think about their future. I wanted to use this post to describe how I approach this.
Future thinking has become more important because of things we see and have experienced around us: Covid-19, ugly wars, the rise in accessible AI tools, climate madness, increased polarisation and terrible politicians and leaders (who appear not to have their fingers on the pulse of today, let alone the future). We all want to prepare for what’s coming (or may come) and to help our companies, communities, families and friends cope with the bad and enjoy the good.
My starting point for thinking about these things is to recognise how hard we find it to predict what will happen more than a few weeks ahead. We are amazing prediction machines that are constantly forming and confirming theories about what we are sensing and feeling, and what we should do about it, but our time frames are seconds and not years.
The smartest person in the room is rarely the room
When we are in groups we don’t actually perform much better unless we are very disciplined in designing our groups, forcing people to think independently and harnessing contrarian views. The smartest person in the room is rarely the room, as group-think, confirmation bias, consensus and a lack of diversity takes hold. We become like ChatGPT, churning out bland, safe predictions and sometimes hallucinating.
We therefore need to make time to visit the future, explore what may be going on and then separately to find a path between the present and this future. This is the model espoused by Bill Sharpe in his excellent Three Horizons: the Patterning of Hope. Bill’s Three Horizons are the present, the near future and the further future. He argues that we need to recognise that these three futures all exist at the same time with the seeds of the far future already planted. We can visit the far future by finding these seeds and imagining what they may turn into.
To make this more concrete and to illustrate what I do for companies, we start, after describing the model, by exploring the present(Horizon 1 or H1); looking for two sets of signals: what are we doing well right now and what are the signs that we need to change? Both will help us understand where we are likely to be heading in the near future (H2). Indeed companies will almost always have plans and a roadmap for H2 although we may challenge these after the end of the exercise.
The next thing we do is to explore the forces that are creating big change for our organisation. I resist allowing discussion of “everything in the world” and encourage these big forces to be those that we can see could affect us. In reality, this is not really a restriction but encourages the participants to make the connections between big changes and their own worlds. Typically in the last few months, these forces have included: the rise of popular generative AI, changes in the world of work (including automation, new jobs and remote working), increased concern (by consumers) about the climate crisis, data and privacy issues, as well as inflation, the economy and inequality.
This discussion needs some careful facilitation in order to keep us future facing and I come armed with provocation and stimulus materials if the group gets stuck or simply thinks about the obvious. I might for example ask them to think about demographics and health, about migration in the light of climate change, supply chain disruption or about food and farming.
The purpose of this exercise is to get the group into a place where they can imagine their own organisation 10 years ahead. This is the world of Horizon 3 and this is where we need to spend some time. Our goal is to produce bold visions of what we are now doing that take notice of the trends that we have explored. The bolder the visions the better the conversations. I ask them to visualise these futures, write postcards or press releases, or create artefacts to bring these ideas to life.
Our next task is to build a bridge between the current (H1) and their imagined future (H3). This is Horizon 2 and it may be very different from their current plans. It should look forward and address how they will need to change what and how they do things to reach their future and it should look back at what they currently do to identify what has been kept and what has been thrown away.
The whole process takes 4-5 hours although I have run shorter versions of half a day that have reached powerful outcomes. However long we have, I try to spend some time reflecting on the process as well as the futures that we have created.
If you think this might be beneficial to your organisation then please get in touch. I love running these especially when I hear people using the horizons language when we meet months later.
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Dreaming of transformed futures – Digital Jobs To Be Done · 24/06/2023 at 11:06
[…] wrote in a previous post that planning with three time horizons is proving to be a very powerful way of framing transformation. It is a very simple idea – […]