 Horizon scanning is a method for identifying early signs of potentially significant developments through a systematic examination of opportunities. It explores novel and unexpected issues, including matters at the margins of current thinking that challenge past assumptions. It seeks to understand what is likely to continue and what could plausibly change. We are asking where is business as usual taking us? Where do we want to go? What are the trends taking us forwards? And how or can those driving forces be harnessed to take us in either direction? The Three Horizons framework is one example of this that we will explore here. Developed in a book by Bill Sharp is a tool for thinking about transformation and how to bring it about. It is a set of thinking tools that help us think collectively about the future in a way that leads to more productive action, to aid thinking about current expectations, rising developments, and possible and desired futures. In this model, the y-axis represents what is the dominant pattern of organization while the x-axis tracks time. The chart is not a prediction. It is more a schema of possible futures that can be achieved. The line H1 represents a business as usual, the dominant way of doing things today. However, this was created and adapted to a world of yesterday and the current context is changing, which implies that it is not fit for the future and it contains the seeds of its own demise. Thus, over time, we predict that it will decline. The trajectory is managerial in nature as it represents a system in use and managers who have to keep it running. It is the way that things get done today. Typically, it involves practicing incremental innovation using familiar approaches to help improve the existing system. However, there are always people who are trying something different other than the dominant paradigm and they start to form a new pattern that is represented by a line H3. This line represents the pockets of the future led by people who see the need to do something different. They are the visionaries and by doing something different create pockets of the future in the present. These are new actors with new assumptions and new values, usually done by visionary individuals gathering small groups of people around them to stand for something different and try and bring it into reality. These can be seen as the future we want and the seeds of that future are present and visible today. We want to see them grow until they become the predominant way of doing things, essentially replacing and improving upon the old H1. Between these two lines is a line H2, an emerging pattern that represents the current innovations. It is the arena of disruptive innovation. These disruptions can take many forms, a natural disaster or climate change, a new technology, a new concept like sustainability, a social movement or cultural innovation like rock music in the mid-20th century. Disruptions are likely to create innovations, new ways of doing or being as different actors step in and innovate in the dynamic space of change between H1 and H3. The important question is how disruptive innovations will affect the transformation between the two. H2 minus is innovation that works to keep going and make more efficient or faster the existing pattern without questioning it. For example, we see plenty of this with digital technologies that have the potential to fundamentally disrupt existing economic models but often get co-opted by existing models. Take for example the sharing economy concept in the early 2000s. Over time, commercial interest caught on to the concept and worked to commercialize it with today's platforms like Airbnb or Upwork. H2 plus is new innovations that go to building the infrastructure for the emergence of new kinds of organization represented by H3. A disruptive innovation that's been harnessed to bring through the emerging future and so it helps to hasten the decline of H1. Wikipedia might be an example of this where technology has been used to demonstrate a different mode of production, i.e. peer production. With a group of people, we can then draw the chart up on the wall and ask, what is business as usual? How did we get to that? How fast is the current pattern declining and what aspects of it might we want to see retained? We can likewise look at H3 and ask, what is the future we want to bring realize? What does it look like or feel like to live in that world? We can ask what in the present leads to that future and where are the seedlings? What history values and culture are embedded within them? We should be able to give specific examples of this as they should already exist. We can ask, how could they be scaled to become more prevalent and give examples of people who are already working on that? We can also look at the disruptive trends, what are they? We can start to analyze them so as to understand them better. They should be multifaceted, political, environmental, economic, technological. What would it look like for that trend to extend into the business as usual world? What can be done to try and harness it? We can look at examples of both. Cases where the trend was usurped by the dominant paradigm and where it is being used to build the new. There is a key consideration for our systems change strategy that emerges out of the three horizons model. That is the question of how much do we work with the existing system? Introducing innovation that extends it into the new versus building something to disrupt the old. Do we adopt strategies that are symbiotic with the existing system? Ones that are designed to take it into the new regime? Or do we develop solutions that are largely mutually exclusive with the current regime but likely easier to work with because they have none of the baggage of the old? In this respect, a lot of our system change strategy is relative to the inertia in the system. We are working in between the old and the new pattern. We are trying to continue those patterns in the old that need continuing and connecting them with the new. And at the same time we are trying to discontinue those patterns in the old that need to be discontinued. That discontinuation we would call disruption. Inertia that takes the form of absolute resistance to some change that needs to take place needs to be met with this kind of disruption. Thus the degree to which we work with or disrupt the existing system is relative to its level of inertia which can be seen to represent the degree to which we should work with the new model versus working with the old. Thinking this through is important as it will tell us where to apply our resources which battles to fight which aspects of the system we leave to die and which aspects we work with to regenerate. This is never an easy question in an ongoing process of inquiry.