Navigating Educational Futures in the Present - A Conversation with Bill Sharpe

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

The whole body of practices that we're talking about here are ways of cultivating that awareness that we can see different perspectives and different possibilities for action. And the future always emerges from the now. So the way to use them was not as stories about the future, but as lenses on the present.

Hi everyone, thanks for listening this week. My name is Tim Logan and the podcast is produced by Good Impact Labs. With so many prevailing stories of uncertainty around for everyone, our roles as educators supporting young people and colleagues to know how to navigate it can be overwhelming. As Thea Snow said on a recent episode, feeling safe in uncertainty hard, but possible. And this is where perhaps we can all learn from the wisdom of those with expertise in futures work and facilitating spaces to explore desirable regenerative futures. Bill Sharpe is one such expert, who through his amazing work has been helping teams in all sectors of organisations and society find coordinated ways of managing innovation, creating transformational change that has a chance of succeeding, and developing ways of seeing the future in the present. He developed the adapted version of the Three Horizons framework as a method for futures studies and practice with Antony Hodgson, Andrew Currie, and Graham Lister. After a career in research and innovation in the computer industry, Bill works with the Futures Stewards, the International Futures Forum, and H3Uni to pioneer new approaches to futures, systems thinking, and transformative innovation. Bill is also the author of Three Horizons: The Patterning of Hope. And Economies of Life: Patterns of Health and Wealth.

Well, lovely. It's a huge pleasure to be able to chat to you, Bill. Discovering the Three Horizons work a few years ago was a really eye-opening moment for me and it's informed a lot of our work in various ways. So no, it's a great pleasure and privilege to be able to chat to you about it today.

Pleasure to be with you, Tim.

Great. So just in terms of a bit of scene setting, context setting for this, I'd love to obviously enable people who have never heard of Three Horizons to get a little bit of a sense of what it is. Hopefully we'll get there. But one of the things I found really, just really connected with me when I heard you describe different ways of gathering that you are seeing more and more and, and this idea of existential convenings being critically important right now. And perhaps you could just describe what you mean by that. It's, it's a strange concept in a way, but it's something really strongly resonated with, you know, a lot of the conversations I'm involved in and a lot of, you know, more and more people in education are asking these much bigger questions, much, you know, very different types of questions than what you seem to have described as cognitive convenings. So yeah, perhaps if you could just describe that and just again, as a way to introduce the idea of this moment broadly that we're in about— there's a lot of people out there trying to figure out what the work is, I think.

It's a good place to start, and those two terms, cognitive and existential, they sound a bit heavy, and they were just the first ones for sort of getting a grip on this. Maybe a good place to start is Three Horizons. It's a technique out of the world of foresight and futures where organizations are trying to take a longer-range look at things and see what they might have to change or what they want to change. So it sits in that broad area. And in my own practice and career, I came— I worked in the technology industry in computing and then later went on doing work on government projects on foresight. And you can think of a typical sort of situation where there's a problem out there that you're wanting to take a view of. People in the room, it's maybe the top team of a company, there's a CEO, they're there to really look at some future challenge like the change to renewable energy. And they sort of check their personal issues at the door. They're coming in as a team to look at a problem that's sort of out there, and all the people issues, dynamic issues, are sort of the responsibility of the, the head person that will take those issues. So big words about our destiny of life and death and love and so on don't really come into the room. And that's a whole world of working in, in that sort of way. And you could call that the cognitive convening, meaning there's something out there, there's a truth out there that you're trying to explore, some factors of uncertainty. And maybe quite a small group where you can really get into that. What my work and a lot of this work is now about is that there is an issue that nobody particularly owns, but a bunch of people have come together to explore that and to explore their own agency, both individually and together around that topic. And there's a convener, as it might be. I worked some years ago with the Luke Hoffman Institute, working in the arena of biodiversity, part of the World Wildlife Fund. And there were 30 people or so, people in the room, and they came from all sorts of different NGOs to explore strategies for restoring biodiversity. So many more agendas in the room, many more aspects of agency, nobody particularly in control, and everyone is there as part of their own individual journey. Yes, they may come from an organization, but really where they are going to be ready to make a commitment, ready to carry things forward on their own behalf, ready to challenge the status quo and stand for something different. And I just took to calling that existential convening because issues of destiny, identity, Values are very much at the center of the work, and we need to have methods where people can turn up feeling that their whole person is engaged in the whole system. And I've taken to calling that existential convening, and it seems to land with more people. I have a colleague, Johan Faesie, professor in York, who gave a keynote speech at the Transformations Conference and said, look, if we're going to meet net zero by 2050, everything will have to change. And if we don't meet net zero by 2050, everything is going to change. So these deep issues of change are now on everyone's mind. And people are turning up, even if it's in what you might call the more cognitive domain, people are turning up with their own anxieties, their own real challenges as part of the picture. What does this really mean for me and what I'm giving my time to?

Right, absolutely. And yeah, what do I care about? What's important to me as a person, as a father, as a husband, as a whatever it might be? Absolutely. And it— I know it, I— it so resonated with me because it just— that's part of what I feel like I'm somehow participating in the educational space about. It's almost like the nature of the questions have just got bigger in inverted commas, you know, I mean, they are just the hyperobjects, the metacrisis, the polycrisis, all of these types of discussions used to be very niche and in a particular corner of the internet, but now are really much more mainstream conversations. So the questions around, yeah, what do we care about? What do we want an education system to be for in this kind of world of it feels the cognitive convening is insufficient to take that on.

Yeah, I often think of it as bringing two sorts of truth together. There's the sort of truth of science where we move away from ourselves, where the criterion of truth is what is true is what is least personal. It doesn't matter who says it. And then at the existential end, it's where what is true is what is most personal, what you choose to stand for, what you commit to, the risks you decide to take. And in a world where your house might be burned down by the next outbreak of fire or flooded or whatever, more more and more of us are going to be facing very direct and real existential threats and questions.

Yeah, that's really interesting as well to me because I wonder, it also makes me think of how also the science is evolving to recognize the importance of context. And it's not, it's not to say that some of the more objectivist type sciences, obviously still, you know, there are still the, the laws of physics, et cetera. But there is the, I feel an increasing awareness that positionality and, and I don't know, something about where something happens, when something happens, a sense of the context in which these things are arising, even from a scientific perspective, is coming in as a potential part of— it's not just a black and white set of objectivist variables anymore.

Yes, I don't know whether you're familiar with Iain McGilchrist's work, The Master and His Emissary, and then the second book, The Matter with Things, and has this wonderful simple phrase, attention is a moral act.

Right.

And how we use it changes how the world comes into being for us, and that one mode of awareness is very focused, very oriented to the tool, and the other mode of awareness is that contextual and meaning, and that we, in our civilization, we have unfortunately given less, deprivileged the more contextual and meaning-making aspect of our attention.

And perhaps we're feeling the effects of that, it feels to me. And also, even from an educational perspective, I started playing with the idea of maybe that's part of what we're also doing as educators is existential convening more now, because it's this cognitivist idea that you've just got to learn a bunch of propositions and long-term memories and then everything learning will be all right. That's clearly being, well, I would say debunked, and there's a much more embodied experience. There's much more awareness of how we learn in place in connection with other people. And not to say that it's a binary, but the cognitive convening and the existential convening, it feels like we've shifted. We are importantly shifting away from the insufficiencies of the cognitive.

And as you say, these things are not at war with one another. You can, um, I did a session for a group who were scientists working in the area of atmospheric chemistry. This was real hard science stuff, but they all had their own hopes and dreams for the future. And at the beginning of the session on what they want to vision the future of their professional work, and I got them to connect with their own sense of meaning and hope and purpose. As we worked through the day and then came back to the strategies, they all went and sort of retrieved the statement they'd made of that without any prompting from me to really help inform the sort of work that they most wanted to be doing. So it's simply opening up that domain of meaning in its both personal and collective sense that is really foundational.

Yeah. No, interesting. And I suppose that really for me is where then it goes into the question of scaffolds and frameworks and tools, because I think it's also not to say that an existential convening is just everybody trying to make sense on their own individually of the swirling, you know, mass of information and disinformation and existential crises, all of that. It's a really interesting question as to what is the role of tools and frameworks to help collectively make sense in that. And again, for me, that feels like really educational work is that's part of what we're doing maybe with young people. So yeah, I mean, as you said, you're coming from a background in foresight and scenario planning and those kinds of things, perhaps, and then leading into Three Horizons specifically, how do you feel about the role of scaffolds and frameworks and tools in just helping people understand those change and possible futures and just doing that sense-making work?

Well, a good place to start would perhaps just be with the sort of central practice of futures as it grew up in the last few decades around scenario planning, which works particularly with the fact that we're storytelling creatures, we like to tell stories, and that the future is uncertain. Just those foundations. And when I used to teach people and facilitate scenario planning, I'd say, look, scenario planning is based on these two basic things. And it means the way we're going to work together for the next couple of days is that if two reasonable people disagree about something, it means it's uncertain. And we don't want to argue one another into submission. We want to keep that visible and use it as a resource. So instead of trying to persuade one another, you're right, you're right, I'm right, you're wrong, etc., say, oh, that's interesting. We both must be seeing different things. We're both bringing something different to bear. Keep that visible. And so what you would do in scenario planning is build up a sense of where all these critical uncertainties were and what people were seeing and not try and reduce them to one view, but actually build them out into different stories. And then with those different stories, you would see the world in a much richer way. And you would see significance in things that you hadn't seen before. It was a commonplace of scenario planning, what's called cognitive priming, that having considered a really challenging, maybe even slightly outrageous possible future, like your closest ally might become something of an adversary, for instance, for instance, that you tell a story about that. And then having told a story like that, some events that you weren't really paying attention to would take on a whole new significance. Oh, that future might be unfolding.. And so the classic thing is you've done this work and you open your newspaper as it used to be, or hear a bit of news, and you spot something and you come, oh, that future I thought was out there somewhere in the distance, the elements of it are already visible. And the future always emerges from the now. So they, the way to use them was not as stories about the future, but as lenses on the present. So that's one example. And the whole body of practices that we're talking about here that and the ones that I'm involved with, Three Horizons, are ways of cultivating that awareness that we can see different possibilities and perspectives and different possibilities for action and explore them in ways— not to say we won't disagree, but explore the differences in more productive ways.

Yeah. And is there a sense that having a shared frame is an important aspect? Because what I mean by that is there's a— sometimes there's a reaction to the cognitive and the, the modern and the, these things that, that the linear, for example, is highly insufficient and it's, it's reductive and it's all these things which is equated with bad, we need to move away from. And then we, it kind of, it's like throwing the baby out with the bathwater that suddenly any frameworks and things that might be perceived to be a bit linear in the way that they flow become part of the old system that we need to move beyond. So this is, it's kind of a little tension that I have sometimes with, we're not looking for algorithms for how to, you know, step by step into this unknown future. But at the same time, there seems to be a yearning for, what is it? Some kinds of frames that hold people in a temporary safety while they explore the uncertainty or something like that.

Yes. And I think the body of practices that come from this work are able to do that even before we start thinking about the future and change. This need to create a sort of container for the work is really, really important, and we use practices of what's called visual facilitation for this. And this isn't where somebody stands in the room and draws a sketch on the wall— that's graphic facilitation, you know, people do that, which is good and it's useful, but I just want to distinguish it from that. We call it visual facilitation, and I learned it from my mentor Tony Hodgson, who's deeply experienced in this sort of work. And the essence of it is that you make sure everybody's voice is truly heard. So like, if we were working together, I'd get your first point and capture that really carefully in around 8 or 10 words. Just really boil it down to it, distill it, one point. And then you write that point up, check you've got it right, and if you haven't, you change it. And then you put that up on the wall. And then I turn to the next person, and, you know, I've asked some question about what are you feeling uncertain about, and you give me a point. Then on to the next person, and you give each person total attention. And they feel their point has actually been heard and everyone else has been listening and they've heard it too. And now you've got a second point and then a third. And you say to people, you don't have to agree with the last point made or any of them. If somebody says A and you want to say not A, that's fine because we're valuing the difference of perspective. And you build up material like that and you can build up 40, 50 points with a group in a room. And now you've got a very rich space of everyone's contribution and everyone can relax because their point was heard and they don't have to keep coming back and say, you didn't hear my point, you didn't hear my point. And then you can start to work with that. You can explore clustering or systemic relations, or it's part of how we do Three Horizons and other processes, is that they rest on this underlying container of visual facilitation, which hugely expands the cognitive working space of the group and allows you to try out different dynamics of bringing things together that might be in contrast and seeing ideas that unite them or pulling them apart to focus on difference. So it's really, really important, the point you're making, that, that these processes, they're frameworks for working with the differences of perspective we all bring and valuing them. That's— every voice has to be in the room. And that becomes even more important, of course, when it's issues of existential destiny, which is nobody has the authority to tell anyone else what they're going to stand for. You invite people, or to what entrepreneurial step to commit to. These are things that have to be brought into view very carefully.

Yeah, no, that's really useful. And it, I mean, it's, we use the language of spaces because the emergence is still allowed. There's still lots of possibility that emerges from it, but it's, there is a container and the container feels really important. You know, the way that that container is presented or framed or articulated or held feels really important.

Yeah, and even before the bit I've talked about, the visual facilitation, which comes before considering what framework, is the whole, all the practices around inclusion. And I did a project a couple of years back now with Watershed in Bristol and had the privilege of working with someone called Zara Ash Harper, who practiced and practices inclusion and works with organizations on inclusion strategies. And before I did any work, we'd had a whole set of conversations with the people who would take part in the process to ensure that they could trust that by coming into the space, they would be heard, that it would be safe and appropriate for them. And then quite a lot of work in the sessions to build up that level of trust. And that was before we started doing any of the quote strategy work on where it might go. So, so the whole body of practice, I think, which is necessary to create those spaces in the appropriate way.

Fascinating. Yeah. And I mean, obviously my lens is education and all the time I'm hearing some of what really good teachers do, you know, is like create really inclusive, psychologically safe spaces in their classrooms and then allow all voices to be heard, et cetera. You know, so it's something about holding space and, and I think again, it's the insufficiency of the cognitive convening that we just rush straight into talking about the thing, right? And not, there's all this preparatory work that feels really important, particularly when you're doing existential convening.

Yeah. Yes. Quite so.

Fascinating. And so, yeah, maybe if— would it be all right now then to give a little bit of an introduction to what then Three Horizons is, as then the next step if you were going to— you've done all that preparatory work and then you were going to use it as a facilitation tool to help people think about their situation. Yeah, maybe could just give a little bit of an overview for people who haven't maybe heard of it.

Hmm. Three Horizons is a really simple framework for getting into thinking about the future, and it's useful in situations where you're feeling our way of doing things day to day is not going where we need it to go. So, you know, people use the phrase business as usual for like what happens every day when you get up. Well, you get on the train to work and you expect the lights to come on and the food to be in the shops. And that's the business as usual world. And with respect to some issue you've got, you're saying, look, what we then call the first horizon, the business as usual is losing its fit to the future. So if you drew it as a line on a page, it would be from left to right, it would be dropping down. And as you went across the page, and that's the first horizon, the business as usual. And we think of it as a pattern of life, something that we're all keeping going by taking part in it. So then if we say, well, then the third horizon is the pattern that is going to come into place over some period of time to replace it, either to grasp the new opportunity or to deal with the sense of failure. And you draw that as growing over time from left to right. So now you've got one line dropping and the other one going. And so the first horizon is the pattern of life we've got. The third horizon is the one that we envisage coming into being as a result of our vision of the future and the other factors. And then the second horizon we draw between the two, and it rises and falls, and it's that messy space of transition, and it's what we would call the entrepreneurial zone. So the first horizon has the feeling of— it's managerial, it's maintaining the job of keeping it going, like making sure your kids get in their school uniform and off to school in the morning. You know, it's very— I'm responsible for something. It's got a managerial sort of texture to it. The third horizon is the one hasn't come into being yet, but we can imagine it. We can think of a world where, you know, we're all in renewable energy or whatever the issue is. So it doesn't fully exist yet, but we can see it in our minds and something we can actually stand for and take a certain risk in standing for it. And then the second horizon is that messy transitional entrepreneurial space where things are being tried out and they haven't quite settled down and we don't know which one's going to win. So, you know, if you're an early adopter, you maybe take a risk on something and, you know, you finally wish you hadn't bought that one. And if you're an entrepreneur, maybe your little startup fails because you made the wrong bet. So there's sort of a pulse of the, the second horizon, and that has that entrepreneurial feel. There's an opening, there's a possibility, there's chance, and you have to go for it when you've got it. So 3 different qualities of the future in the present, and they just simply map— at one level, they simply map a process of transition. Today's pattern, the future one, and the messy process of change. But they're all there all the time, and they're 3 qualities of the future in the present. The quality of maintenance, time as a sort of resource. The quality of the future, the vision, the something I stand for. And that quality of entrepreneurial opportunity in the moment, something I commit So they've each got quite a different quality in the present moment, and we've got a choice about which one we use in any situation. And that's three horizons.

Love it. I know it's been so useful to us in our work, but, but I just, I think that's worth dwelling on that phrase, qualities of future in the present, particularly because if you just a very matter of fact way, if you Google three horizons, sometimes what you see is this McKinsey, I would say flattening of this, what you've just described. Now I'm also aware that that's that they were the, I don't know, some people from McKinsey were, were some of the originators of the first Three Horizons model. But I don't know, correct me if I'm wrong, but it feels like in the way that some people talk about it and from that work that it's just a three temporal horizons going off into the future. It's like where you are now, where you want to be in a few years' time, and then this zone of transition to get there. And that's very much not what you are describing. And I think clearly maybe there's some value in mapping, thinking about the future in that way, but actually what you're talking about, these qualities of the future and the present, is so much more, so much richer. Maybe just wanted to invite you to differentiate somehow and maybe tell a bit of that story about why, how did it come to the way that you're talking about it now from the origins of it.

Yes, and I'm entirely positive about the fact that the people at McKinsey opened up this space with that first idea of a three horizons. And what you said is true, it tends— the way people see it and use it is three rising S-curves, or curves, sorry, into the future.

Yeah.

Which tend to be seen in a somewhat linear temporal way. And indeed, what makes Three Horizons in the way that I and my colleagues use it is this shift to three qualities in the present. So when we draw the Three Horizons, they're all there all the way across the diagram. It's not that the third horizon is a curve out in the future, it's, it's an aspect of the present moment. It's a way that the future can emerge from the the present moment. So that's the basic shift, and that is what I find gives it its power, because it then relates to these three natural modes of awareness that everyone seems to be able to relate to really easily. It came into that form on a Foresight project in 2006 that I was working on with Tony Hodgson and Andrew Curry, and it was on the future of sort of intelligent infrastructure, smart cities, future of mobility, that sort of nexus of issues. And they were using this idea of three horizons, and I was doing a technology forward look and was being asked to do a sort of 50-year forward look. And I said, well, I can't really give you evidence of that. And they said, well, yes, you can. And I thought, well, yes, the evidence we have is what people say they're going to do. So if you tell me that you're going to try and build, you know, I'm going to live on Mars in 50 years' time, whether you will or not, I can't actually know, but I can hear what your vision is. And I say, that's a certain sort of evidence for the future.. And coming out of a technology world, I was very used to dealing with having visions and seeing other people's visions because they talk about them, they're very clear. And then in the second horizon, this entrepreneurial space, you can see where someone is moving from exploring a vision to actually making a move to try and realize that in an entrepreneurial sort of way. So we have this sense that the future speaks to the present through the commitments that we make, as Sarah put it. And people are very clear about their commitments if they've got them. And if they've got that commitment, you can sort of see that that is one of the ways that the future can actually unfold. So that's when it came into being in its current form of the, say, the three qualities of the future in the present.

Yeah, no, that's useful. And it also, I mean, in a way resonates again with what you said about Ian McGilchrist and attention being the moral act, because there's the way— what I heard you saying there is that there's almost a choice in the way you put your attention in the present around the different qualities. Because the other way of saying that is that sometimes people start talking about someone as a Horizon 1 person, or, you know, ah, that's a Horizon 3 person cuz they're the visionary or whatever. You know, it's not a type of person that you are as a disposition. It's a choice of attention or awareness about kind of, uh, yeah, quality in the present that you're thinking about sustaining or envisioning or whatever verbs you might then Yeah, good on it.

It's really important, and we always like to stress exactly what you've said. There's no H1, H2, H3 person. There are these three different ways of behaving and looking at the world. But we do talk about a shift from mindsets to perspectives, calling a mindset a way of looking at the world that you don't really notice that you've got. And so if you firmly adopt the first horizon view as right and the visionary is just out to lunch and irrelevant, then you're stuck in your first horizon mindset. But we all have all three of them available. And when we move to perspectives, we recognize these are three different ways of orienting ourselves to the emerging future. And we should use them all in an aware way to give ourselves flexibility, to give ourselves skill in navigating complexity and being able to use all three voices and recognize them all in the room, which is one of those things of creating a container where people feel that they have the permission to use each voice as required.

Yeah, no, absolutely. And it, I was in a meeting this morning with somebody in a quite elite private school in central London. And you think there are certain things in that constrained space that you can say in a way. And assume if, if you invoke a Horizon 3 perspective in what feels like a very heavily dominated Horizon 1 space, it can be quite jarring. I have that experience quite a lot is that, because I, with the podcast and with many things, I tend to be taking the perspective of Horizon 3 quite frequently. And then when you bring it into a space that is more dominated by Horizon 1, business as usual kind of patterning, let's say, it can feel quite like oil and water, you know, they somehow incongruous in that kind of space.

Yeah, it's worth being sensitive though, in that situation, that that if you're speaking to somebody who is in their first horizon context with those responsibilities, yeah, it might just not be socially realistic to expect them to voice a vision. But they're a human being, and if you got them out in the pub or got them in another context with their colleagues where it was okay, then, and created the safety for them— it's sometimes assumed safety is only for the marginalized, but safety can be an aspect of, of having that responsibility, but it being legitimate for you to be in a much more exploratory mode free to use the other perspectives and voices without being judged for it. So, you know, something to think about of have I actually made it possible for the people who have to keep the current system going and be responsible to have that degree of freedom?

100%. That's exactly the feeling I came away from that meeting with. Yeah, exactly right. And it's also, it really resonates with me because I, again, in this work in education, there's a lot of talk about Horizon 3 visions of planetary flourishing and, you know, let's all transform the education system, all of this kind of big language. And then there is a lot of holding of the current reality of underfunded public schools, understaffed, over large classes, you know, lots of challenges in the Horizon 1 context that makes it very difficult to have those kinds of Horizon 3 conversations. So it's, it's an interesting, again, an interesting meeting and trying to find and create the spaces where it's possible to have those kinds of conversations, I think is, it's a really important piece of the work. And that's, again, that's why I'm so interested in Three Horizons, cuz as a way of holding that space for that conversation, that I found it an incredibly generative frame.

Mm-hmm.

But I know you've, you've done quite a bit of work in education, so perhaps could you reflect a little bit on how have you seen Three Horizons being used in educational context?

I've not done a lot myself, but the International Futures Forum did some good work in this area, which is written up on the website, and it was Tony Hodgson, who I've mentioned, and Graham Lester, Director of IFF, and it was one of the really early steps in using Three Horizons much more broadly, and they worked with the Curriculum for Excellence in Scotland, and there was a central team that developed some little prompt cards that could then go with the Three Horizons as a kit and go into schools to enable staff and pupils to have these sort of conversations about the future. And it got very widely used, and I think it— that was part of the journey of realizing that with Three Horizons we've got something that would work very widely with any sort of group of people, and particularly working with children as well as with adults. So it was very encouraging in seeing we've got something that could land very quickly with people and support these sorts of conversations. So yeah, that's been our main experience of using it.

And it, I mean, it is incredibly intuitive. I, I think in the way that it's as a framing that young people definitely can engage with. And again, it comes back to that, but creating the safe contained spaces for having those kinds of conversations where we really helping people think in somewhat structured ways about what can be a really overwhelming content for a conversation about the future, or, you know, that isn't just some fluffy bunnies, unicorns, imaginary future, but an actual, you know, something which is, which I bring myself into in terms of the things I really care about and the things I would love to see in the world, but also engages with what's the reality of, of now in relation to that as well.

And as you're saying, I think from earlier on in this conversation, developing these ways of seeing the world and relating to it needs to become part of education because it's the growing generation who are going to need to develop this sort of flexibility. One of the members of the little team I work with seeing how we can continue to build this initiative has two young girls, 8 and 10, and the 10-year-old, just hearing about all this from her mum, you know, quite a lot, has produced the Three Horizons map for their sustainability project at school and just—

Oh, brilliant!

She just did it, you know.

Fantastic.

So as ever, the kids get onto this much more quickly than the adults.

Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, that's it, isn't it? Why are we We, you know, historically have we seen these kinds of things as just a, you know, an expensive strategy consultant's toolkit or whatever, rather than, you know, a commons of practice, right? As you talk about, like, get it out to everybody just to help to frame and understand and collectively make sense.

Yeah, this is a move, deliberate move to democratize the practice. And of course, I mean, there's a reason why it's been in the hands of expert consultants because that's been a way to make a living. Of course. And that's fine., but now what we need is that it becomes part of a cultural capacity to envisage and bring about transformative change and then to live more transformatively. So yes, it's changing mode is what I'm trying to do.

Amazing. And could you perhaps just say a little bit about that idea of a commons of practice? Because to me, that again, another thing that just totally resonates is creating that possibility that's democratized, as you say.

Hmm. There are two truths around this, I suppose I'm working with. One is that we're now quite clear that everybody can move into this space. It can become part of the culture to think in these sort of ways. And for that, you do need tools, just like if you're going to learn basic literacy, you have to, you know, learn to read and write. So there are resources that you need to develop the practice. And so the first requirement is just to go about this like Wikipedia, putting all the world's knowledge out there free at the point of view. So I've been inspired by that, say whatever tools are necessary for this should be available to everyone free at the point of use. And then Over and above that is the sense that there is also a skill of facilitation, and we can't ignore that, that we need people who can make use of that common base and bring in their own unique practice, their own unique context and setting of this work we talked about earlier, bring in their own contributions. And so part of the point of having this Three Horizons Foundation, you can think of it as just one other tool. You've got 20 tools, get another one, you know, you're a facilitator. But what we're trying to do is make it more like a platform in which all the different practices can meet. Meet within this one general framing of looking at the future and bringing about change. A bit like you have your Android or Apple platform and you bring in all your apps, that, that if we share this fundamental framework underneath, all the different practices will be able to meet together, and any one facilitator doesn't have to invent everything else. So we want a commons of practice that, again, for the people who are trying to become the facilitators of change, they've got a common base, will be able to come together in different configurations very quickly and effectively So that my aim is that there is a step change in the collective impact of all the people like yourself who are out there trying to bring about change and need to work with others in very flexible ways on many different problems.

Yeah. No, and I find that so useful. It's somehow a ratcheting of the starting point is hopefully already somewhat of more of a shared understanding before you even start the work, rather than every time having to start from scratch again. And that feels important. Yeah.

And I particularly felt that some of these things have been in the hands of quite deep and sophisticated practice. And so part of the challenge at the moment is finding these really simple tools and methods that can offer people stepping stones into a deeper practice.

That's interesting. I wonder if, could I ask you just about the role of the facilitator? Because that strikes me, I've been thinking quite a bit about that as well, is maybe A, what are the particular qualities of that kind of of person who's holding those kinds of spaces, not the quality of a person, but you know, the, the capabilities that one could learn for that. And also I, I've been thinking a lot about whether young people could and should actually also learn those kinds of capabilities. 'Cause I want, I, it strikes me that perhaps they don't naturally come across a lot of those kinds of opportunities to learn those kinds of skills unless they take a particular course, specialist facilitate a training course in whatever methodology later on as they go through. But I wonder, I don't know, I wonder, I just wondered what your perspective on whether that's something that young people could also learn.

I'm relying on it. What I'm pursuing is what we're calling this 1% ambition that we should have 100 million of the next generation feel equipped to convene and hold these conversations around change and transformation. Look at it the other way around. Supposing we haven't even got 1 in 100 who can hold these conversations. So you could go into any organization and say, have you actually trained up, you're 1 in 100 that can actually work throughout your organization and support these conversations you need to have. And that 1 in 100, like any discipline, we can all learn things, but we rely on the teachers and we don't expect everyone to become a teacher. But some people, as they grow up, realize, yeah, I have a, I'm good at that. I can help teach people these things. And, and this is no different. The interest and skill around facilitation is different from the skill of playing football or teaching Spanish or whatever it might be. I'm sure people will sort of self-identify, which is what I see. Is that everyone can acquire the basic skills. We know that because they say they're natural to us, to have these— this capacity to engage with the— our future consciousness, as they call it. We all have a future consciousness, but only some people will want to develop their own career path in terms of being teachers and facilitators. Like, I learned mindfulness a lot, and I, and I really value the people who have gone down the path of being the facilitators and teachers, because we've all got the capacity, but we need help and guidance on our own individual journey.

Yeah, it's fascinating. I hadn't realized that that was something you were working on, but I mean, obviously feels very connected to your ambition towards this commons of practice and the work with H3Uni and the different platforms that you're creating to share, as you say, democratize this. But also it's been really with me recently that there are very few, I mean, you get role models for inspiring you to learn Spanish or to learn maths or to take up mindfulness course, but there aren't that many me, maybe I'm wrong, but it feels like there aren't that many opportunities for young people to be inspired, to understand that even stepping into the possibility of holding a space and holding challenging, constructive conversations is even a thing. You know, because it, it just feels like they don't, there are very few role models around inspiring that, that is a critically important role that we have now.

I, I quite agree with you and that's That's the motivation for this, you know, 1 in 100 goal is that that would be 1% of 10 billion people on the planet, you know. So yeah, I quite agree with you. It has been a more specialist domain and also the sort of underlying systems thinking has been a very— 5 years ago, that was a very off-on-the-side sort of specialty, had an aura of complexity and difficulty around it. And yet we all have a natural orientation to the patterns of life and we need to mobilize that. Very much this, this field is really only coming into view right now.

Yeah, I love it. I love that you're doing that and it feels so important. And I mean, it's funny actually that you bring in systems thinking, cuz that feels to me like a really interesting example of what Jonathan Rowson calls the H2- vortex about the way that certain things which are in horizon 2 get captured by horizon 1. And that I think is happening, for example, in the educational space, this idea of systems thinking is quite à la mode, let's say, quite in fashion. And then it, it somehow gets captured to sustain and, and just recolor, let's say, Horizon 1, but actually nothing fundamentally changes about the shift towards the, a potential Horizon 3 future. So I don't know.

Yeah.

So I don't know, is it, it's useful to articulate the difference between that and what happens in that entrepreneurial Space.

So this notion of H2+ and H2- is one of the more useful aspects of Three Horizons, and sometimes people say, what's the difference between an H2+ and - innovation? And it may be the same thing, but just seen from those two different perspectives. Kate Raworth has a very nice little video which she did years ago on introducing Three Horizons, and she uses the example of smartphones, which disrupt, disrupt the world. And from an H1 perspective, they might be used to try and just entrain people into your existing H1 offer. And, you know, if you're being driven by the algorithm, very disempowering sort of continuation of an H1 version of business. Equally, they may be used in a, in an H2+ mode to empower people, you know, rural farmers to get a better deal because they've got direct contact with the markets and so on. So the same innovation might be seen both in an H2- and an H2+ way, depending on which end of the spectrum you look at it at, whether you look at it from an H1 position, how you can capture it and use it to extend your position,, or from an H2+, how it might lead you on and be a stepping stone, a growth point from which you can make your way into the third horizon. And policymakers find this very helpful. The Future Generation Commissioner's Office in Wales have particularly picked this up very early on, and it's become a short— heard them use a shorthand in the office of the Sony MiniDisc, which they say, well, that was a bit H2-, you know, the Apple iPod was H2+. You got two different products there, but you know, you sort of get the idea that that same moment of opportunity could be used in either way.

Absolutely. No. And again, it just totally resonates with me and the work that I see, because lots of these conversations about different kinds of H2-type innovations, entrepreneurial activity, trying to enact or make possible different Horizon 3 futures. And then very quickly, they often get captured by the kind of business as usual, the system, as people may call it.

By the language itself of sustainability getting captured.

Precisely. Exactly.

Or the circular economy, I think, is a good example, which if used as a mode of, you know, delaying the point where things enter the environment in unsustainable ways, can be really just an extension of the first horizon. Or in terms of getting truly non-waste methods of working that are safe within the biosphere, you know, it's plainly a critical step. It is part of the transition to the third horizon. So very often, say, these concepts are not in themselves one or the other and can easily be captured and used for what people would call predatory delay by those who have no intention of moving to the third horizon, but will try and capture the language and the concept and use it in a way which doesn't bring about any fundamental change.

Yeah, but I think just to maybe just to finish, I find the way you talk about the patterns, you know, the patterns that we see and perceive and enact and are part of every day as humans just going about our business in the world, because some of this talk can get, can get quite abstracted or can feel like work, it's, you know, even a lot of the futures and foresight type conversations I find quite disassociating from my human experience of just being alive and, you know, just going about my business. And I find I really appreciate that about your work is that there is something very grounding about just, you know, we're all humans just trying to, we're patterning our way through life. And, and sometimes you see perceived patterns and those patterns will enable other patterns. And that's, I mean, your phrase, the patterning of of hope, I just think is just absolutely beautiful because it's, you know, it starts with us just going about our bumbling business as humans, right?

That's right. And that's really where I'm trying to go, get people to focus on the patterning of hope, how they can bring their own hope into the process of renewing the patterns of life. And that we all have that freedom. It can never actually be taken away from us that at any moment we can stand for the renewal of life in the way we live the next moment.

Thank you so much. Absolutely amazing. And I'm just, I will share the, you know, all of the resources and the different spaces where the frameworks and the different resources are. But so the video from Kate Raworth, I agree, is very useful. So I'll put all those in the show notes. But no, thank you, Bill. Just such useful work.

Thank you. Thank you.

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