About
Welcome to Future Stewards, the home of the Three Horizons Hub and Commons, in service of a regenerative future. Rooted in a rich history and shaped by the contributions of many visionary thinkers and practitioners, the Three Horizons framework has evolved through years of collaboration. You can learn more about its fascinating journey in our History of Three Horizons and Future Stewards below.
Today it is entering its next chapter, nurtured by a team of custodians together with a wide community of practitioners and collaborators. This collective effort acts as a catalyst for even broader collaboration, fostering connections and supporting the development of a vibrant global community.
A key focus of this new chapter is ensuring the framework remains accessible and impactful. The Three Horizons practice has been gifted to the Creative Commons, reflecting its open and inclusive ethos. Future Stewards is dedicated to fostering a thriving community of practice, enabling the framework to scale and evolve in service of a regenerative future.
Led by Bill Sharpe, Future Stewards is guided by a team of dedicated custodians who work alongside the broader community to steward the Three Horizons framework into its next chapter:
Bill Sharpe | Co-founder Future Stewards
Co-founder of Future Stewards, co-creator of the Three Horizons framework and author of Three Horizons: The Patterning of Hope. Bill has been deeply involved in the framework’s ongoing evolution and dissemination, consistently working to expand its accessibility and impact across diverse fields.
Rebecca Ford | Director IFF
Director of International Futures Forum (IFF), stewarding IFF’s mission to enable people, communities and organisations to flourish as effective agents in powerful times. IFF is taking on the role of host for Future Stewards.
Marion Birnstill | Founder Inner Ripple
Founder of Inner Ripple offering collective spaces for shared reflection on the deep physical, emotional toll of living through, hoping for and working on change. Building bridges between Inner-led change & Regenerative Futures.
Layla Wildon | Co-founder Impact Amplified
Layla co-founded Impact Amplified to bridge the gap between today’s challenges and tomorrow’s possibilities, using the Three Horizons framework extensively in this work. Impact Amplified is facilitating the curation of a Three Horizons use case library and leading a project on layering the framework with other tools, methods, and approaches.
A Rich History of Collaboration and Evolution
Timeline of Key Milestones
1999
The first published version of a three horizons model appeared in The Alchemy of Growth, authored by McKinsey & Company consultants Mehrdad Baghai, Stephen Coley, and David White. This model provides a framework for organisations to manage growth across short, medium, and long-term horizons.
2005
Based on further development of the systems aspects of the approach by Tony Hodgson, Three Horizons (3H) was used by Hodgson, Andrew Curry and Bill Sharpe in UK GO Science’s Foresight project Intelligent Infrastructure Systems. It was used both to construct the evolution of the scenarios and to lay out future innovation paths, and introduced the idea of using the horizons as three orientations to the future in the present. The project reports were published in 2006.
2008
As a result of this collaboration, Andrew Curry and Tony Hodgson co-authored the paper Seeing in Multiple Horizons: Connecting Futures to Strategy (Curry & Hodgson, 2008) which reviews the development of the approach in its current form as used by Future Stewards and the relationship to earlier work and the wider field of futures.
2010s
The framework was developed further by Graham Leicester, founder of the International Futures Forum (IFF), in collaboration with Andrew Lyon and H3Uni founder Tony Hodgson. This included pioneering its use in schools through a partnership with Education Scotland. Since then, the approach has been actively developed and promoted by IFF and H3Uni with the creation of an online commons of resources: www.iffpraxis.com/three-horizons & https://www.h3uni.org/resource-library/.
2010s
From this time onward other futures practitioners started using the method and disseminating it widely. An important research collaboration began with Ioan Fazey and the team at University of York who continue to develop the research foundations.
2013
Sharpe published Three Horizons: The Patterning of Hope, which has become a foundational text for spreading the practice more widely.
2014
Sharpe began collaborating with Leaders’ Quest (LQ) and its founder/CEO Lindsay Levin. Together, they focused on developing a facilitator training programme and expanding the framework’s accessibility.
2015
Lindsay Levin established Future Stewards to support climate action initiatives following COP21. LQ provided significant support to building up the Three Horizons practice, funding Yasu Mali to work with Sharpe on developing a successful facilitator-training programme and disseminating the practice more widely.
2015 - 2020
Key financial support for the H3Uni resource library came from We Mean Business, and from LQ, Thirty Percy, the University of York, and Sharpe for the video resources.
2017-2024
Work on research foundations continued, including on Three Horizon Archetypes and moving to apply Three Horizons in large scale processes, such as to understand how to transform knowledge institutions, food system change, and on using concepts of regenerative systems to help establish Third Horizon Visions.
2022
Leaders’ Quest transitioned into a new stage, with the various initiatives of Future Stewards being spun off. The Future Stewards brand was passed to Sharpe as a vehicle for the next chapter in building up the Three Horizons Hub and Network.
2023
Large scale teaching ‘experiments’ began at the University of York, using the solutions-oriented teaching approach of their Department of Environment and Geography, where 150-175 undergraduate students are taught how to use Three Horizons to develop audacious strategic plans for transforming aspects of the City of York and share them with diverse actors working in the City.
2024
Sharpe brought together a team of current custodians, represented by The International Futures Forum (IFF), H3Uni, Impact Amplified, and Inner Ripple, to steward the Three Horizons framework and practice into its next chapter. The IFF has taken on the role of host in collaboration with these organisations. As part of the distributed commons approach, Impact Amplified is facilitating the curation of a Use Case Library.
2025
Who else will join to support the next chapter of this journey?
References: Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Horizons
An Invitation to Contribute
We are currently working on a fuller account of the history of the Three Horizons framework. If you have been involved in its development, we warmly invite you to share your experiences. This collective history reflects the diverse contributions of those who have shaped it, and your insights can help ensure the story is as complete and inclusive as possible.