What if we could have better conflicts? What if, instead of causing us to rage or numb or end relationships, our conflicts could spark innovation, creativity, even hope? I've worked across contested spaces for as long as I can remember. I spent a decade alongside Palestinians and Israelis, who were fighting for a just and viable peace. Today, my work ranges from corporate culture change through to reimagining the ecosystem of humanitarian aid.
My role is to create the conditions that allow people to have better conversations, better conflicts, about the things that really matter, and find new pathways for collaboration. And in my 20 years of doing this work, I've come across a tool which I'd like to share with all of you today, that served as a skeleton key to unlock trust and transformation.
I want to give you an example from my corporate work. Now I know people love to hate banking, but bear with me. A few years ago, I was asked by the president of a global finance firm to do a closed-door strategy session with his new team. They were undergoing a complex, messy merger, and it was clear that, while a lot of attention was being placed on the technical integration, that the culture needed real work. There were tensions and power struggles, passive aggression, and narratives of the “other” forming. Sound familiar?
My job in that room was to build enough trust and provide a shared language so that this group of 15 more-than-a-little skeptical individuals could consider why there might be more value in changing than staying as they are. To do that, we used a futures tool called Three Horizons to help them engage from a place of mutual respect, to see their shared value. And instead of looking at the merger like something that was happening to them, to find their collective agency in shaping it.
I was first introduced to Three Horizons by a very special futures practitioner named Bill Sharp and his colleagues at the International Futures Forum. It's been used on carbon pricing, tackling childhood obesity and building regenerative business strategies.
So how does it work? It starts with two lines on a page. At the bottom, we have time, starting in the present at the bottom left and going out into the future. On the vertical axis, we have the dominant pattern, the way things work. The further up the line we go, the more commonplace or prevalent things are. This is horizon one. It's the business-as-usual horizon. The way our world works today. We rely on this horizon to be stable and consistent. But as the world changes, horizon one shows signs of strain and is no longer fit for purpose, and falls away in its dominance.
Then, you have horizon three, the future we're heading towards. When it comes to change, this is the pattern that will take over from the first horizon. But it isn't just out there in the future. There are pockets of the third horizon in the present moment. Think of self-driving cars or robots on our factory floors.
And in the middle, you have the bridge of horizon two -- how we get from here to there. This liminal space is the zone of innovation and entrepreneurship. Some of it will lead to incremental change, some will be transformative. Harnessing AI to tackle climate issues, citizen assemblies or participatory budgeting.
But in our attempt to shape a different world, or respond to the way in which our current one is being disrupted, we often find these horizons at odds with one another. I like to think about them like voices in a conversation. Horizon one is the pragmatic voice with the managerial mindset, responsible for keeping the lights on. Maybe it's a corporate CEO, or maybe it's a coal miner whose family's been doing work a certain way for generations to make ends meet.
Horizon three is the voice of the dreamer. Maybe it's an artist, or an activist, or the voice of a younger generation whose worldview is still being formed. You can just imagine a conversation between those two voices: often adversarial, rarely rooted in mutual understanding, speaking past each other if they speak at all.
Sometimes, horizon two, the voice of the entrepreneur, gets brought in to broker between them. But without a sense of shared purpose, without a shared direction of travel, all three voices dig their heels in and get stuck in their own rightness. What ends up happening are negative conflicts and effortful incremental change, at best. At worst, we see blame loops, vilification, dehumanization.
What Three Horizons allows us to do is see our shared dilemmas and how each horizon has a value to contribute to resolving them. So instead of horizon one being out of touch or immovable, we see it as a voice of heritage or an ally in scaling bold ideas that all too often get stuck in ideation. And horizon three. Instead of being idealistic or radical, we see it as a voice of inspiration, maybe even courage. Horizon two, who can sometimes be seen as a sellout, as a builder helping take ideas into action. No one horizon is going to be the hero of the story. We need all three to be working together.
Back to my corporate example. We used Three Horizons to help this group tell a different story about themselves in the merger. We started by introducing those three voices so that they could go from negative to positive mindsets. And then, we created a map, starting in the third horizon, three years into the future, after the merger, where they could suspend disbelief enough about their own ambition. What would they be proud of? What would they stand for? They talked about being more purposeful, more trustworthy, adding more value to their customers and society than they were extracting. From there, we went back to horizon one to tune in to all the examples of stuckness, things that were holding them back that they would need to let go of in order to achieve that new shared vision. And then, in horizon two, where were there examples of innovations already underway? Where do they already have momentum for change that they could leverage? They walked away with a sense of possibility, energy for their futures and a sense of abundance.
Conflicts are ubiquitous. They are all around us. Some, especially right now, causing unfathomable devastation. Others, seemingly less intense, like my corporate example, still cause pain and paralysis. Because at the end of the day, we all just want to know our contributions matter. We want to know that we have some agency in shaping the worlds around us. Three Horizons is a simple, powerful way to see ourselves as part of something bigger than any one of us, to bring equal parts conviction and curiosity to the things we deeply care about, and find value in our differences.
I am not suggesting we all just get along. There is far too much we need to be fighting for. But it's how we fight, how we have better conflicts, that just may tip the scales, as we build a third horizon that we can genuinely be proud of.
Thank you so much.
(Applause)
