The Value of Pausing to Think About the Future

Two weeks ago at P&I we facilitated a Spanish based session of "Visión de futuro para mi organización," and something struck me again, as it always does: the hardest part of the workshop is not the exercises. It's convincing a room full of busy, capable people that stopping — even for one hour — to think about the future is not a luxury. It is one of the most concrete things they can do for their organization. And you have the oportunity to do it by joining us in the upcoming free virtual session in English on September 8th from 1-2.30 PM GMT (register here). Let me tell you more about why you should consider it.

We live inside a rhythm that rewards reaction. Meetings, deadlines, funding cycles, the next report, the next crisis. In that rhythm, the future becomes something that happens to us rather than something we participate in shaping. And yet, if you slow down enough, you start noticing that the future is not entirely absent from the present. It is already here, in fragments.

Pockets of the future, already among us

I like to think of these fragments as pockets of the future: the pilot project nobody has scaled yet, the unusual alliance that formed almost by accident, the practice a younger colleague brought in that quietly changed how the team works, the question a funder asked that nobody had asked before. None of these, on their own, look like "the future." They look like noise, or like exceptions. But held together, they are signals of where things are already moving.

Image by Trung Nguyễn at Pixabay

This is precisely what our workshop's diagnostic phase is designed to surface. Before we ask people to imagine anything, we ask them to look honestly at where they stand today — what has changed in their context, what the organization does, what others say about it, what kind of relationships it builds. That grounded starting point matters, because pockets of the future are easy to miss if you haven't first mapped the present with real attention.

Why Three Horizons helps

This is where the Three Horizons framework becomes useful, not as decoration but as a genuine thinking tool. H1 is the world as it works today — the systems, assumptions and routines that got the organization here and that, for now, still function. H2 is the messy, transitional middle: a mix of innovations that might renew H1 and others that might just prop it up a little longer without really changing anything. H3 is the emerging future — not a prediction, but a horizon of possibility that is already sending out seeds, visible if you know how to look.

Image by Jukka Niittymaa from Pixabay

What I find most valuable about this framework is that it refuses a false choice between "stay grounded" and "dream big." It asks both at once. It gives people permission to imagine a genuinely different future in H3 while still taking H1 seriously enough to ask what, from what already works, deserves to be let go, and what deserves to be carried forward. It turns foresight into a practice of discernment rather than fantasy.

In the workshop, after the H1 diagnostic, we invite participants into a short guided pause before asking them to journal, individually, about their organization in 2035. Then, only after that image starts to take shape, do we move into H2: what assumptions or habits that once served us well are starting to feel like a brake, and deserve to be honestly reviewed? What new outlooks, projects or unconventional allies are already announcing that future? What small pilot could we design in the coming months to test one of our bets on the future, without putting today's work at risk? That sequence — future first, then the bridge back to today — is deliberate. It is much harder to imagine boldly if you start from the constraints.

Theory U and the shift from observer to agent

This is also where Otto Scharmer's Theory U becomes a helpful companion to Three Horizons. Theory U asks us to notice the quality of attention we bring to a situation — are we simply downloading old patterns, or are we truly sensing what is trying to emerge? — and it insists that real transformation depends less on new strategies than on the invisible field of listening, trust and openness from which those strategies arise. I wrote about this social field a few months ago, in a piece exploring why our greatest challenge may not be understanding the future but believing we can shape it. The core idea there still holds for me: foresight is less about predicting what comes next and more about cultivating the agency to notice what is emerging and act with intention before certainty ever arrives.

That shift — from passive observer of change to intentional agent within it — is, I think, the real purpose of an hour and a half spent on Three Horizons. Not to produce a polished vision statement, but to let people practice, together, the muscle of seeing themselves as participants in what comes next.

Creative tension in a VUCA world

None of this is comfortable. Holding a picture of a possible future next to an honest picture of the present creates a gap — and that gap can feel unsettling. But I've come to see that gap as productive rather than paralyzing. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of creative tension: the kind of tension that is not destructive but necessary, the tension a community must feel and hold in order to move from one reality toward a better one it has not yet reached. In a VUCA world — volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous — I think that idea deserves to be recovered. The discomfort of imagining a future you don't yet know how to reach is not a sign that the exercise has failed. It is the invitation itself.

Where art comes in

There is one more ingredient I keep returning to: creativity. Journaling about 2035, sitting with a guided pause, allowing an image of the future to form before analyzing it — these are not purely rational tasks, and they shouldn't be treated as such. In an earlier reflection on the role of art and creativity in research and policy, I wrote about how some of the most powerful moments in strategic foresight work happen when we suspend the analytical mind and open ourselves to other sources of knowing — body knowledge, intuition, emotion, narrative. Thinking about the future, I've learned, is not only an analytical act. It is also, unavoidably, a creative one.

So the next time an hour is offered to simply pause and think about where your organization is headed, take it. Not because you'll leave with a finished plan, but because you'll leave having practiced something harder and more valuable: the capacity to notice the pockets of the future already forming around you, and the intention to help shape what comes next.