Traditional approaches to social transformation presuppose linear movement: advancing toward distant horizons of justice, equality, or sustainability. Yet this linear conception itself functions as containment, positioning liberation as perpetually beyond reach while maintaining present patterns of extraction and exploitation. The horizon isn't a destination but a mirage that keeps us walking in predetermined paths while believing we're making progress.
The Three Horizons model appears to map transformation through time - from the declining present (H1) through disruptive innovation (H2) to the emerging future (H3).
Three Horizons maintains:
- Linear time as the fundamental frame
- Predictable stages of transition
- Management of change through horizons
While appearing to transcend linear thinking, it actually preserves:
- The assumption that time flows in one direction
- The belief that transformation can be mapped and managed
- The illusion of control over emergence
Three Horizons subtly reinforces containment by:
- Mapping the future within known coordinates
- Assuming transformation happens through predictable stages
- Maintaining institutional control over "innovation"
Like a Klein bottle folding through itself, what seems like emergence actually curves back into containment - the very institutions driving collapse remain in charge of defining "transformation."
Regenerative Divergence reveals how:
- Time itself is hyperbolic, not linear
- Transformation happens through quantum phase shifts
- True emergence can't be mapped or managed
Instead of horizons, it shows:
- Pressure points where reality's hyperbolic nature breaks through linear containment
- Dimensional pivots that transcend institutional control
- Phase transitions beyond predictable pathways
Three Horizons tries to:
- Map the territory of change
- Guide transformation through stages
- Maintain institutional coherence
Regenerative Divergence shows how to:
- Navigate unmappable phase transitions
- Flow with natural emergence
- Allow institutional patterns to dissolve and reform through resonance
The Critical Difference
Three Horizons remains within the Master's House by:
- Preserving institutional control over "innovation"
- Maintaining linear assumptions about time and change
- Containing transformation within manageable horizons
While Regenerative Divergence reveals:
- The artificial nature of institutional time
- The quantum nature of real transformation
- The impossibility of managing emergence
The key insight: Three Horizons tries to map and manage transformation from within existing patterns, while Regenerative Divergence shows how to flow with the unmappable nature of real emergence. One maintains the illusion of control; the other aligns with life's inherent creativity
Single optic of progress. Presumes one desirable H3 can be charted from the center—erasing plural, contested futures.
Neutral strategist myth. Facilitator claims omniscient perch, ignoring that capital, race, and patriarchy steer which “H2 innovations” scale.
Conflict-free glide-path. Predatory incumbents appear as a curve to manage, not as agents who sabotage change to keep rents.
S-curve compression. Deep ecological or spiritual ruptures flatten into tidy trend-lines; systemic trauma is graphed away.
Stakeholder anesthesia. Everyone is a “transition actor,” so historical oppressor/oppressed roles dissolve into polite workshop stickies.
Where Spiral Dynamics flattens cultural space, the Three Horizons framework flattens time and struggle. Three Horizons (3H) is a strategic foresight model that maps out change across three temporal “horizons”: Horizon 1 (H1) is the current system (“business as usual”); Horizon 3 (H3) is the envisioned future system (more just, sustainable, etc.); and Horizon 2 (H2) represents the innovations and disruptions that bridge the gap between H1 and H3. The framework encourages making “assumptions explicit” and charting how the old system might transition to the new. On its surface, this is sensible and even visionary – it invites groups to imagine radical futures (H3) while navigating present challenges. However, in practice the Three Horizons often imposes a teleological timeline that can erase the past, suppress difference, and convert struggle into manageability.
Notably, the standard Three Horizons narrative assumes a smooth evolutionary succession. The current system H1 is seen as “inherently flawed… bound to eventually decline”, while H3 – “the better, more sustainable, and more just system we want” – is framed as an inevitable successor given enough time. In fact, the framework explicitly states that “to some extent, the rise of H3 [the desired future] is considered inevitable if given enough time.”This baked-in assumption is profoundly optimistic – and dangerously naive. It implies that progress will naturally occur, aligning with a quasi-Darwinian faith that bad systems fail and better ones emerge. Such an assumption glosses over the reality that entrenched powers fight ferociously to keep H1 alive. It also sidesteps the need for accountability for past harms: if H1 is destined to fade out, why dwell on its origins in colonialism, slavery, ecocide? **Horizon planning can thus become a way of looking insistently forward while forgetting backward. As one critique of mainstream futures practice notes, certain future visions “erase the experiences of countless peoples… that have experienced the end of the world due to colonialism or capitalism”, by framing crisis as only a looming future event and not an ongoing lived reality. The Three Horizons, if applied without a decolonial lens, may encourage participants to treat history as a distant backdrop – relevant only insofar as it produces H1's “flaws,” but not as a source of owed justice in shaping H3.
By focusing on consensus visions of H3, Three Horizons sessions can also suppress differences in perspectives. Participants are often led to agree on what the “desired future” should look like. Dissenting visions (especially those coming from marginalized perspectives or radical imaginaries) can be unconsciously filtered out as unrealistic or “too H1.” After all, the group must produce a single H3 image. This can tilt the outcome toward a sanitized utopia palatable to the dominant viewpoint. For example, in a multi-stakeholder workshop about urban futures, the H3 that survives might be a tech-utopian “smart city” vision with green parks – while more contentious ideas (like abolishing police or returning land to indigenous communities) get left aside as “not in scope.” In such ways, horizon mapping often carries an implicit pressure to converge on a shared vision by smoothing over conflict. The facilitation may not explicitly silence anyone, but the logic of the exercise (moving from messy present to agreed future) rewards harmonization over agonistic debate. Conflict itself becomes reframed as something to be mediated in H2, rather than a political reality that might shape H3 in unpredictable ways.
Most insidiously, Three Horizons can turn struggle into something manageable – something to be plotted on a timeline. Social movements, for instance, might be invited into an H2 category as “innovations” or “emerging changes” that will help bring H3. This recognition can feel validating, but it also neutralizes the movement's oppositional energy by absorbing it into a project plan. Activism gets bureaucratized: protest becomes just another Post-it on the foresight chart. The urgency and moral disruptive power of, say, a climate justice uprising might be translated into a bullet point: “rising public awareness and youth activism (H2+) pushing policy change towards renewable energy (H3).” While this is not false, it masks the power struggle and contingency involved. It implies a level of control – as if by identifying “drivers of change,” the managers of the process can steer them. This is a hallmark of what James C. Scott called “legibility” for control: turning dynamic, grassroots phenomena into schematic elements that technocrats can manipulate. Indeed, “in making people ‘legible,' the state replaces autonomous processes… with prescriptive behavior designed by technocrats'. Three Horizons, when used by corporate or government planners, risks doing just that. It assimilates wild social energy into a synoptic view (an “overall, aggregate… view of a selective reality”) that makes “a high degree of schematic knowledge, control, and manipulation” possible. In plainer terms, it takes unruly bits of reality and fits them into a controlled story about change.
Consider how “green capitalism” uses horizon planning. Faced with climate crisis (the “unprecedented threat” to H1), many business and government leaders now champion a “transition to a sustainable economy” – essentially an H3 vision of decarbonization without changing the class relations of capitalism. Plans are rolled out for reaching “net zero by 2050,” full of innovation (H2) like electric vehicles, carbon capture, and market-based solutions. This certainly looks like profound change. Yet, as critics point out, “the ideology of green capitalism seeks to ‘preserve existing capitalist systems and relations… while ensuring new domains for accumulation in the transition to a… sustainable economy.'” In Three Horizons terms, much of what is labeled H2 or even H3 in these plans is really H2-: innovation that reinforces H1 by making it more efficient. For instance, investing in carbon-offset markets (H2 innovation) might lower a corporation's apparent footprint, thereby allowing the core business (H1) to continue extracting and polluting a bit longer. The Three Horizons framework itself acknowledges such phenomena by differentiating H2+ vs. H2- (transitional innovations vs. sustaining innovations). However, in practice this can give the illusion that the system is diligently sorting “good” change from “bad” change – while the masters of H1 still define the criteria. They can label their minor tweaks as “H2+ on the path to H3” and claim to be change agents, even as they sideline more disruptive changes (like degrowth or redistributive economic models) as unrealistic. This is a form of predatory mimicry in planning: adopting the posture of long-term transformation to avoid any immediate radical shift that would threaten incumbents. The timeline to H3 can always be drawn a little longer, giving H1 more breathing room. After all, if H3 is inevitable, what's the hurry? Thus horizon planning becomes a way to defer and displace true urgency – the can is kicked down the road, but with very nice charts to show for it.
In essence, Three Horizons flattens the rich, contested landscape of social change into a two-dimensional graph. It offers a timeline (the X-axis) that assumes one direction of history, rather like a highway to the future. But genuine transformation is seldom linear or foreordained. It may erupt from the side, from the past reasserting itself, or from anomalies no model predicted. It may cycle or spiral (in the non-hierarchical sense of returning, revisiting, reweaving). By contrast, Three Horizons' “flat choreography” of change leaves little room for surprise. Every piece of the dance is given a mark on stage: H1 gradually bows out, H3 triumphantly enters, H2 mediates the handoff. Reality is rarely so neat. By erasing the role of mystery and chaos, and by underplaying that conflict is not just a misunderstanding but often a real collision of interests, this framework can inadvertently serve the status quo. It projects a comforting vision that we can guide systems change efficiently toward equitable outcomes– a message readily embraced by those who would prefer change without disruption. After all, if transformation is a managed process, then power need not be confronted, just strategically negotiated. Opposition need not be honored, just engaged as a stakeholder. In this way, the Three Horizons becomes the Master's compass: it always points to a horizon that, mirage-like, recedes just enough to keep the present rulers in place until they can reposition themselves in the “future” scenario as well.