In short
- Look at three time layers at once: today's practice, the transition, and the model five to ten years out.
- Make the far picture sharp first, then reason back to today's choice.
- That way direction steers your decisions, not the hype of the week.
The problem with planning from now
Most organisations plan from their current practice: what can we do a bit better next quarter? That works, until the world changes faster than your roadmap. Then you're chasing the facts, and every choice is a reaction to something that already happened.
Three horizons at once
The Three Horizons model looks at three time layers in one move. Horizon 1 is current practice, what delivers value today. Horizon 3 is the future model, how the work might look in five to ten years. Horizon 2 is the transition in between, where it is messy and tense and where most organisations would rather look away.
You don't plan forward from now. You start at the destination and work back.
Why you start at Horizon 3
By making the far picture sharp first, you get a compass. From there you reason back: which steps in Horizon 2 bring us there, and what does that mean for the choices of now? That way decisions in the present aren't driven by the hype of the week, but by a direction you set yourself. That is where our name comes from: first to the future, then back.
What this looks like in a room
In a strategy session with a management team we used this model to get past the operational AI question to the real conversation: what does this mean for our business model and our position in ten years? The insights came from the group itself. Our work was building the frame in which those insights became visible, and planning a moment later to test the scenarios against reality. Foresight is not a one-off exercise, it is a rhythm.
Ruben Horbach
Co-founder · Back From the Future
Ruben researches how organisations adopt AI meaningfully — not as technology, but as a change in work and people. He builds the agent infrastructure behind BFF and speaks about the near future of work.
