Learn how to facilitate the Three Horizons framework to reveal and enact transformation in your context in this 4-week online course led by ‘Three Horizons: The Patterning of Hope’ author Bill Sharpe and IFF Director Rebecca Ford.

What is Three Horizons?

Three Horizons is a futures and systems change framework for exploring transformation and how to bring it about. It can be applied to any context or complex challenge, and is a powerful way of engaging different perspectives in mapping the landscape of change you are navigating – generating insights, strategic opportunities and pathways for shared action. 

Three Horizons enables us to see challenges in the present (H1), aspirations for the future (H3) and the kinds of innovation creating change in the transition space (H2) as different patterns in dynamic interplay. These three patterns of activity are all visible today, in the present – and how they interact and play out over time creates the future.

Why Participate?

This training is delivered by the International Futures Forum (IFF), co-originators of Three Horizons practice and host of Future Stewards. It will equip you with the skills, confidence and resources to facilitate successful Three Horizons workshops and processes in diverse contexts. 

It will also focus on cultivating the awareness and enabling conditions to realise the potential of Three Horizons to:

  • Diagnose complex challenges – mapping change dynamics and seeing the patterns in complexity. Generating strategic insights. Identifying the types of innovation that could be more or less transformative.
  • Engage different perspectives – hosting effective conversations in multi-stakeholder organisations and systems. Opening up a space for equitable participation. Working productively with disagreement and uncertainty. Building a shared picture of the landscape of change.
  • Develop future consciousness – growing our awareness of the future potential of the present moment, and how to put that awareness to work to create the future we aspire to.
  • Generate hope, agency and collective action – collectively envisioning hopeful futures and enrolling others in your vision. Revealing opportunities and strategic pathways for action, starting immediately. Engaging our creative potential.

Learning Experience

Our approach emphasises interactive, experiential learning, and sessions will include:

  • Learning through modelling and application – demonstrations of how to facilitate Three Horizons processes and specific activities, plus dedicated space to try them out yourself in small groups, reflect with the cohort, and ask questions of the facilitators
  • Tuning up our awareness of our ways of knowing, doing and being as facilitators 
  • An emphasis on developing foundational visual facilitation skills that deepen team participation in Three Horizons and other methods
  • Examples of how Three Horizons has been facilitated and applied across different sectors, scales and challenge domains 
  • Time to build connections with, and learn from, your cohort of people working to create change in a diverse range of professional contexts
  • Dedicated time to ask questions within the sessions, plus two optional drop-in sessions with Bill Sharpe for more spacious Q&As

 

We will use Zoom and Miro as our digital learning space during the sessions. Ahead of the first session you will gain access to a dedicated participant website with the course materials. At the end of the course, we will provide you with a pack of resources, including workshop templates, guides, scripts and slide packs.

Your Facilitators

Bill Sharpe | Co-founder Future Stewards

Bill is a regenerative futures practitioner and system thinker, 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. He is co-founder of Future Stewards and a member of the International Futures Forum and H3Uni, with whom he works to build a global commons of futures practice for transformative change.

Rebecca Ford | Director IFF

Rebecca is Director of the International Futures Forum (IFF), stewarding IFF’s mission to develop capacity and release potential for people, communities and organisations to flourish as effective agents in powerful times. IFF is co-creator of the Three Horizons and the framework is used widely in our work in diverse multi-stakeholder settings – healthcare, philanthropy, education, policy, business and more – and with organisations ranging from startups and community groups to national governments and global companies.

Dates and Time Commitment

The training takes place over 4 interactive online sessions from 2-5pm BST / 9-12am EST – you can join from anywhere, so long as you can attend at these times on:

  • Session 1: Wednesday 30 April 2025
  • Session 2: Thursday 1 May 2025
  • Session 3: Thursday 8 May 2025 
  • Session 4: Thursday 15 May 2025

 

Optional Q&A Sessions with Bill Sharpe and Rebecca Ford

  • Friday 9 May 2025 2-3pm BST/ 9-10am EST
  • Tuesday 20 May 2025 2-3pm BST/ 9-10AM EST

 

This course is designed for all learning to happen in the sessions themselves – we will provide further readings and invitations to reflect/practice in between sessions for those interested, but there is no expectation other than being fully present at the scheduled session times.

Fees

Tier 1

£ 1,250
00
  • For corporates, public sector, philanthropic organisations, large NGOs and consultants to these types of organisations with significant day rates.

Tier 2

£ 850
00
  • For small organisations (<20 people) and self-financing individuals

We have a couple of partial bursary places available for people in need of financial assistance to support their learning. There is more information about bursaries in our FAQs.

If you would like to send >3 employees on this training, please contact us and we can offer a discount.

Contact us

If you have a question that’s not answered in our FAQs below, please get in touch with Hannah Thompson hannah@internationalfuturesfourm.com

FAQs

International Futures Forum (IFF) is a charity which enables people, communities and organisations to flourish as effective agents in powerful times. 

Founded in 2001, IFF has a long track record in addressing complex, messy, seemingly intractable issues – local, global and all levels in between. We build capacity and release potential to meet these challenges with a transformative growth response, generating practical hope, wise initiative, and an expanded sense of what’s possible.

IFF is co-originator of the Three Horizons and host of Future Stewards, the home of the Three Horizons Hub and Commons dedicated to spreading, deepening and evolving this practice in service of a regenerative future.

Something about bursaries here