Tag: ThreeHorizonsModel

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Horizon One Highway

In the Three Horizons model, Horizon One is the world that surrounds us — the one that grabs our attention, dominates our habits, and shapes our worldview.

Because it fills our field of vision, Horizon One obscures our view of possible alternative futures. 

Earlier this week I wrote about cognitive ease — the brain’s tendency to favour familiar options over ones that require more thinking effort. It’s the easy option of taking the familiar path, rather than the harder work of beating a new one. 

Horizons One is the beaten path. It’s the default route; the easy path.

But if we want to move towards a thriving future — one in which our work as designers and builders actually creates life and strengthens our communities and ecosystems — we need to beat a different path. And we need to do it every day. 

That takes effort and resourcing. 

We need time to reflect. We need time to rest. We need space to notice is what is missing and to dream about what is possible. 

And we need the nourishment of living things and the nourishment of community. 

Resourcing ourselves can help us resist the daily pull of the familiar. And we can keep searching for paths towards more thriving futures, even when walking down the Horizon One Highway looks like the much easier route. 

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The Map Room – mapping systems, horizons, and change

This week we ran The Map Room, the second workshop in our Critical Thinking for Engineers (and Other Humans) programme. If the Observatory was about looking outwards, this session was about making sense of what we’ve seen—mapping the system, tracing its logic, and finding out where we might start to make change.

We explored:

  • The Systems Bookcase model: a tool for organising system layers, from what gets built through to the values and paradigms that shape it.
  • The Three Horizons framework: helping participants spot signs of long-term change—and understand their own role in it.
  • The Library of Systems Change: a way of recognising how future practices are already quietly present in today’s systems.

Some of the most powerful insights came when participants started applying the tools to parts of their work they hadn’t considered “design” before—like internal policy, comms strategies, or team culture. It was a reminder that systems thinking isn’t just for buildings or infrastructure—it’s for how we work, organise, and evolve.

We also talked about system boundaries, shifting roles, and what it means to design something that doesn’t just meet a brief, but changes the system the brief sits inside.

The Map Room builds on the Observatory, taking data and analysing it in readiness for the Decision Engine, where we decide on the next course of action to take. That will come later in June.