“Examining the similarities, differences, and tensions across the three horizons can help us be intentional about how today’s actions could improve the current child care system, or transition to one that fits people’s needs and the future better. ”

Idea in Brief

This blog explores the futures thinking tool - The Three Horizons method from our futures toolkit.
The example below applies the Three Horizons tool to child care in the U.S.

By Katherine Prince

The COVID-19 pandemic made it abundantly clear that American child care as we know it isn’t working. The pandemic disrupted an already strained system, thrusting many parents, especially women, out of the workforce and deepening a crisis of care. Child care centers have been having difficulty sustaining operations as many workers earning poverty-level wages have left for higher-paid positions.

Attempts to fix child care via Build Back Better risk being part of the problem, not a viable long-term solution, as they address surface symptoms of a bigger, structural problem. Yet getting even those fixes in place has represented an enormous political challenge.

This quandary highlights the challenge of moving toward the futures we envision. It can be incredibly difficult to look beyond the status quo to articulate something fundamentally different that could work better. Even when we manage to dream that big, the space between today’s norms and that ideal future can seem murky and fraught with the temptation to return to the security blanket of the status quo.

The Three Horizons Method

Fortunately, tools are available to help us imagine what we want for the future, articulate how that’s different from and the same as today, and consider how we might bridge the gap. One of these tools is the Three Horizons method, that can be found in our Futures Toolkit.

This method helps us look to the far horizon and examine how we might best run the current system and innovate toward a future that serves emerging needs, not the old needs for which current systems were designed.

Created by Bill Sharpe of International Futures Forum, the Three Horizons method can help us manage long-term change. It looks across time to help people examine systemic patterns.

As H3Uni describes it,

“The model is based on the observation that businesses, technologies, political policies and even whole civilizations exhibit life-cycles of initiation, growth, peak performance, decline and even death. These cycles can be viewed as waves of change in which a dominant form is eventually overtaken and displaced by another.”

Typically, people look at the first horizon to describe what’s happening now, set their sights on the third horizon to articulate where they’d like to go, and then look back at the second horizon to explore how to move between them.

Making deliberate choices about how much time, attention, and resources we devote to the near-, mid- and long-term futures can help ensure that our strategies are taking us where we really want to go – not keeping us stuck in the present or thinking we’re moving toward our ideal futures when we’re not.

Horizon One: The Near-Term Future

Horizon one describes business as usual. It’s what we have been, and are likely to be doing over the next couple of years, assuming everything remains generally the same. Some parts of it no longer fit people’s needs or the world around us. But other parts of it should be more enduring. Horizon one invites us to consider what we might need to leave behind, because it is not aligning with people’s emerging needs, and what we might want to conserve.

Horizon Two: The Mid-Term Future

Horizon two describes how people and organizations begin to innovate toward a viable future. It looks at the mid-term future. Horizon two is a transitional zone in which we make some improvements that can cover us while we’re working toward bigger change and where we lay groundwork for our ideal futures, piloting and improving new approaches. Horizon two’s interim solutions help us learn and increase strategic fit with the changing external environment – for a time.

Horizon two is an important bridge zone, but it carries some risks.

We risk thinking that these interim solutions will be enough.

We run the risk that the current system will co-opt horizon two’s innovations to maintain itself.
We risk thinking that we can jump straight to our ideal futures without tending to the decline of the current system.

Horizon two helps us shepherd the current system deliberately, while giving space for longer-term approaches to be tested and improved and to gain social acceptance. We usually look at it last, because it depends on how we define horizon three.

Horizon Three: The Long-Term Future

Horizon three describes our visions for the long-term future. It looks ten or more years ahead. Collaborating to develop shared visions can help to challenge our assumptions about what might be possible even though they might seem unattainable or unrealistic today. It also demands that we look at what might need to change to fit the fluid external environment.

While it stretches our imaginations in useful and necessary ways, looking to horizon three can challenge our sense of security:

Grappling with future possibilities brings us face to face with uncertainty, which can feel unsettling.
Considering significant change can highlight how the positions we hold today might change and how power dynamics could shift, altering not just what the world looks like but how we influence and benefit from it.

The third horizon can be an uncomfortable and exciting place to spend time. Journeying there is necessary, because the visions that we generate for the far future become the destinations that will guide our strategic choices today and tomorrow.

Applying the Three Horizons to Child Care

Each horizon looks to the future – it’s a question of how far out and from what perspective. Each horizon will also be present in the future, to varying extents and in varying ways.

Below I apply the Three Horizons method to child care.

Horizon One: Child Care’s Near-Term Future

Elliot Haspel has described the current state of child care in the U.S. as one of welfare. The child care industry is fragmented, with providers competing for limited resources and families scrambling to access and pay for high-quality care. Without significant change, child care will continue to:

Remain inaccessible, unaffordable and inflexible, with high-quality care especially hard to come by for low-income families. Most care is also available only during traditional working hours.
Be left to individual families to fund instead of being treated as a public good.
Constrain women’s economic contributions.
Limit parental choice as a result of regulations and specific definitions of quality.

We need to address these and other issues to make child care work better for children, families, the people working in the sector, and society as a whole. We also need to consider what aspects of today’s approaches to keep.

Horizon Two: Child Care’s Mid-Term Future

Horizon two of child care would be roughly three to five years out. We might characterize it as being focused on sustainability: for families, for the child care system and for the economy. We seem to have learned the hard way how important child care is to enabling people to work outside the home. Many current and proposed innovations seek to make it more affordable and to keep child care providers and the system as a whole solvent. Those are important goals, and innovations toward them will improve child care.

Some current innovations and proposals represent possible second-horizon bridge strategies:

Spreading worker-owned cooperatives such as Philadelphia’s Childspace could make the sector more resilient by improving working conditions for caregivers and outcomes for children.
Expanding paid family leave could give families more options when caregiving needs arise, increasing work-life balance and families’ economic stability.
Expanding the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit by increasing its amount, making it fully refundable, linking it to income, and advancing payments monthly instead of annually. This could give families both more child care support and more space to pursue solutions that work for them.
Instituting a federally funded, locally governed system of universally accessible child care centers could guarantee the affordability of high-quality care, increase access to early learning opportunities, and increase women’s earnings over their lifetime.
Creating early childhood districts could position child care as a public good and lead to new ways of delivering and financing child care.
Establishing Federally Qualified Early Childhood Education Centers, modeled on current Federally Qualified Health Centers, could increase access to high quality child care and early education, raise caregivers’ pay, and enable the integration of children with special needs into more child care settings.

Other second-horizon strategies could also emerge. We need to keep considering how such innovations could improve child care, while remembering that they would be steps along the way, not end points.

Horizon Three: Child Care’s Long-Term Future

In a visionary future, child care would be seen as being inherently valuable, not just something that helps people get by or shores up the economy. Some possibilities from the our Foundations for a Flourishing Futures Forecast include:

What if child care systems, structures and narratives reflected the true value of caregiving?
What if child care and other early childhood support systems fostered the resilience of young children and families as job security and stability decreased for most working-age adults?
What if a guiding principle for child care was to create more stability for young children and their families?
What might child care look like if we transformed it with multiple systems, approaches and perspectives in mind instead of starting from what the child care sector looks like today?
What if high-quality child care were seen as a basic right, not as a commodity where quality varies based on the price tag?
What if joint care structures for elder adults and children addressed caregiving needs while creating new opportunities for people to connect across generations?

Like other systems, child care is going to have to adapt to new social, technological, economic, environmental, and political realities. Considering our visions for the future invites us to consider what we truly want and what approaches might fit the changing landscape. Those visions will help us stay the course as we navigate the twists and turns of the path before us.

Practical steps

In our Futures Toolkit, we outline the practical steps to put the Three Horizons method into practice. Gather a group of people who have a range of perspectives on and experiences with child care, or simply people you interact with regularly, to explore its three perspectives.

Managing Deliberate Change

Examining the similarities, differences, and tensions across the three horizons can help us be intentional about how today’s strategies and actions could improve the current child care system or transition to one that we think will fit people’s needs and the future better. Returning to the framework periodically can help us continue to move toward our preferred futures while making child care work as well as possible today.

Why not check out our futures toolkit with instructions, examples, and templates for three futures thinking methods that can be used by anyone who wants to create powerful long-term change for children and families.

This blog is part of a series on futures thinking and child care, co-produced with KnowledgeWorks:

Finding the Compass to our Ideal Future (Now vs The Future Tool)
Build Back Together was Never Going to Save Child Care. Here’s Why (The Systems Iceberg Tool)

Katherine Prince is Vice President of Strategic Foresight at Knowledgeworks.

What's on the Horizon for Child Care?