*This text is taken from the Education Scotland’s Promoting Innovative Practice and Transformative Change Document
First Horizon OR ‘how good are we now?’
The first horizon is the dominant system, as it currently exists. This horizon is:
- ‘business as usual’
- contains the case for change and the story of decline; and
- may be delivering successfully but it is gradually losing its ‘fitness for purpose’.
As a result, the system becomes out of date and less successful. People begin to lose faith in what they are doing and wonder whether there is a better way. This is often the trigger for a conversation about the future.
Second Horizon OR ‘how do we get to where we want to be?’
This is the transformational system. In the second horizon, innovation has started in the light of the apparent shortcomings of the existing system. This horizon is:
- the ‘future space’ where tensions are played out between vision and existing reality and between possibilities and barriers;
- where the distinction between innovations that merely improve the status quo and those that transform what you do become clearer
- where options are tried out and where you experiment;
- where dilemmas and paradoxes are explored;
- a point of potential disruption in the process of navigating to the third horizon;
- this is the pace where improving schools and services spend increasing amounts of their time. However, it is also where innovations may be introduced which just ‘prop up’ the existing, declining system, delaying the inevitable.
Third Horizon OR ’how good can we be?’
This is the future system. This horizon is about ideas and proposals for a future system that will require the transformative change of the second horizon. The first stirrings of a third horizon are those innovations already happening but that today look way off beam. This horizon is:
- the long term successor to business as usual;
- the product of radical innovation that introduces new ways of doing things;
- the desirable future; and
- a new approach that offers a fresh, visionary possibility.
The ideas or proposals of the third horizon have the potential to become increasingly relevant and appropriate in the future because they represent a more effective and informed response to the changes that are already occurring in the external environment. All three horizons are always present.
Read The Three Horizons part 1
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.
