*This text is taken from the Education Scotland’s Promoting Innovative Practice and Transformative Change Document
The three horizons approach, in the form of a strategic thinking board game kit, aims to provide you with a helpful approach to exploring the creativity and imagination that change demands. Learners can be part of this process and their insights harnessed too. This kit sets up three perspectives called the three horizons. These perspectives relate to the present and the future. They will help you to re-organise your knowledge, ideas and aspirations so that you may look at them again with a fresh eye.
Using the kit can help you to:
- see both the present situation and the emerging future differently
- formulate aspirations about the future you desire
- create a shared vison of what you can achieve: and
- relate a shared vision of possibilities to how you plan for improvement
Change is a double-edged sword. Its relentless pace these days runs us off our feet. Yet when things are unsettled, we can find new ways to move ahead and to create breakthroughs not possible in stagnant societies.
Leading in a Culture of Change
We live in a rapidly changing world. Our shared aspirations are for education itself to drive that change and, in an ideal world, get ahead of it. But deciding how best to prepare learners for their future, and
to do better in the present, is a demanding task requiring determination, especially when the future is uncertain. We can gain inspiration from a variety of sources, and we can bring intelligence, expertise, experience and knowledge to bear in a focused way. This may sound daunting, but thinking about future possibilities is energising too. And we do it all the time.
The kit has been designed to be used in three stages:
- A strategic conversation that envisions the future: this phase enables you to engage in a conversation about the way things are today, things that are happening in the external world and in the worlds of policy and emerging practice that might impact on the way you do things at present, as well as the things you really aspire to in the future.
- Improvement planning: takes the results of that mapping of the landscape and explores the implications for improvement planning that focus on the things you need to change in order to move towards the future you desire.
- Tracking progress: uses an overview to review the activities you planned and undertook to become a reflection on where you are the next year and so on. It helps you to keep track of how near you are getting to your planned transformation and your longer-term vision.
Read The Three Horizons part 2
Acknowledgememts
Education Scotland has licensed the Transition Leadership tools and the Three Horizons toolkit for the specific and sole purpose of improving Scottish Education and the partner services that support it. We are delighted to have partnered the following people and organisations in this venture: Executive Arts Inc.; James R. Ewing, ForthRoad Ltd.; International Futures Forum and Graham Leicester.
