Bringing Three Horizons into Strategic Risk Practice
How Three Horizons can support risk leaders in building anticipatory capability — moving beyond backward-looking registers toward shared language for change, weak signals and timely action.
Risk teams are increasingly being asked to look further ahead: to spot emerging risks earlier, understand how risks may evolve, and support strategic decisions before the window for action closes.
This use example explores how Three Horizons can support risk leaders and teams who are building anticipatory capability. It shows how the framework can help move risk conversations beyond backward-looking registers and historical data, towards a wider view of system change, weak signals, emerging patterns and practical action.
In this context, Three Horizons is used as a shared framing and dialogue practice. It does not replace risk registers, quantification, scenario modelling, stress testing or monitoring. Instead, it helps create the conditions for those tools to work better by giving people a common language for change, a way to hold different perspectives together, and a bridge from noticing emerging signals to deciding what to do next.
Use experience and impact
The use of Three Horizons in strategic risk practice responded to four recurring challenges.
First, many risk practices are still shaped by a backward-looking default. Loss data, incidents, audit findings and trend analysis are useful, but they are less helpful when a risk is still forming and there is little precedent to draw on.
Second, there is often an action gap. Horizon scanning and weak-signal work can produce a watchlist of things to monitor, but this does not automatically lead to ownership, decisions or timely action.
Third, many emerging risks are cross-boundary. They do not sit neatly in a single risk category, but form through the interaction of technological, operational, regulatory, reputational, social, environmental and economic forces.
Fourth, foresight literacy is often concentrated in a small number of people. If risk teams are to help the wider organisation become more anticipatory, they need methods that others can understand and use.
Three Horizons helped address these challenges in several ways.
It provided a shared language for talking about change. Rather than treating the future as a distant time period, the framework helped people see three patterns present in the system now: the dominant pattern losing fit, the emerging future pattern already visible at the edges, and the turbulent zone of innovation between them.
It also brought different voices into the conversation. The manager’s voice, holding responsibility for today’s system; the visionary’s voice, pointing towards a different future; and the entrepreneur’s voice, experimenting with what might help us move between the two. For risk conversations, this made it easier to legitimise different perspectives rather than allowing one view to dominate.
Three Horizons also made weak signals more practical to work with. The idea of “pockets of the future in the present” helped groups look for tangible examples of emerging change already happening somewhere, rather than discussing the future in abstract terms.
Most importantly, it helped bridge the gap between insight and action. The distinction between H2− and H2+ supported better conversations about whether a response was simply propping up the existing pattern, or helping to grow a more viable one. This made the method useful not only for sense-making, but for prioritisation, decision-making and action.
The impact was to make anticipatory risk practice more accessible. Three Horizons became a useful front-end for strategic risk conversations, helping teams widen their view of the system, work with uncertainty in shared language, and involve people beyond the risk function in forward-looking conversations.
Reflections for practice
This example suggests that Three Horizons can be especially helpful for risk teams early in their foresight journey, or for organisations trying to build anticipatory capability beyond a specialist team.
Its value is not that it does everything. It will not quantify a risk, generate early-warning indicators or satisfy a regulator looking for evidence of monitoring thresholds. Its value sits upstream: helping people notice patterns, make sense of emerging change, explore different responses and move from signals to action.
For strategic risk leaders, this makes Three Horizons a practical way to begin building the shared literacy, systems view and action orientation needed for more forward-looking risk practice.
Further reading
This use example is based on Layla Peirce’s note, Looking forward: why I use Three Horizons in my risk practice, which explores the foresight mandate for risk leaders in more depth and explains how Three Horizons can complement emerging risk, horizon scanning and strategic risk practices.
Read the article — Looking forward: why I use Three Horizons in my risk practice, by Layla Peirce
