The Patterning of Hope
The horizon line behind a section of the Great Wall of China.
Most of our Salons begin with a text — a film, a book, a framework we hold up to the light. This one began with a person.
What We Discussed
Three Horizons, Future Consciousness, and the Discipline of Hope
I’ll admit I was a little proud today. Bill Sharpe has spent decades developing Three Horizons — the framework that quietly underwrites much of how I’ve come to think about the future — and having him in the room felt less like hosting a guest than like sitting down at the source of a river I’ve been drinking from for years.
I found Three Horizons back in 2017 or ’18, looking for a way to help a brand define a vision for itself, and I simply ran with it. A lot of people, it turns out, arrive that way. Bill says that’s the point: you can introduce it in a moment — there’s today’s pattern, a future pattern, and a messy bit in between — and a twelve-year-old can carry it into her classroom the next day.
But the thing I keep relearning is that Three Horizons isn’t a timeline. Rodney pressed on exactly this — whether the picture is meant to be read over time, like a graph. Bill’s answer was that it’s both. There’s the linear story of change, where the first horizon loses its fit and we open up the future. But the horizons are also three qualities of time present in any single moment: the responsibility of getting through the day, the imagination that holds a future, the opening you choose to step into or not.
I offered the image of a DNA strand, and Bill liked it — when life is in flow, the three are tightly bound; when the first horizon stops fitting, the strand unravels, and your work is to take a risk and stand for something apart from the pattern. That reframing — that the future isn’t only ahead of us but available now — was the first of two unlocks I had today.
The second was about hope itself, and it took the whole room to get there. Bill kept returning to a distinction I’m still holding: That hope is an orientation of the spirit, not a prediction about outcomes — closer to Havel than to optimism. Its opposite isn’t worry, which is where Dedef reasonably started, but despair: A kind of death-in-life, the loss of any sense of agency toward living. Hope, in Bill’s telling, is the refusal of that — the insistence that life can be renewed in the present, whatever it costs you.
However oppressive the first horizon, the third horizon is a domain of ultimate freedom — the freedom to renew humanity in the moment.
— Bill Sharpe
John Hicks gave us the most useful image of the day on this. Hope, he said, isn’t something you find on the pavement like a ten-dollar bill — that kind depletes fast and doesn’t include your agency. You have to charge it. You bite the bullet, embrace your agency for half an hour, get going, and something starts to happen.
Hope is this battery that you can access — but you have to charge it first.
— John Hicks
John tied that to meaning, which he named as the real currency of life — not money — and described the three horizons as a way of regenerating meaning where habit and maintenance have worn it away.
Kwesi did something I appreciated: He refused to let the framework stay abstract or comfortable. First, he reframed his own relationship to time — he tends to live in the first horizon, fixed on the present and its core problems, and Three Horizons pulled him out of a linear, almost mathematical view into something closer to quantum, the ability to see yourself from outside your current position and navigate from there.
Then he asked the harder question. How do you unlock this in a place as divisive and individualistic as the United States, where so many people are wedded to the first horizon? Bill was honest that he doesn’t claim deep expertise in the most polarized rooms, but he pointed to where it must begin: Awareness. You meet people with compassion, and you help them recognize that they are being inhabited by a pattern — that they are not the pattern, and that agency is recoverable. Kwesi connected it to his mother’s background in education, the Montessori instinct that you’re teaching the basic building blocks of thought, and to Bill’s own mission of equipping a hundred million people to hold these conversations. Kids, everyone kept saying, just get it.
Michael raised the question I’d been circling: what happens when people hold genuinely different, even colliding visions of the third horizon? Bill told us about a workshop with young Palestinian community leaders. After mapping their own futures, he asked them to build the maps they imagined Israel, Jordan, and Egypt would build — and what surfaced underneath the real, unresolved opposition was a floor of shared values, everyone’s deepest wish being peace and fulfillment for their families. It echoed the Dalai Lama line Bill keeps close: human first, Buddhist second, Tibetan third. Adam Kahane’s work on collaborating with the enemy sat underneath all of it.
What moved me most, though, was how personal the room let itself get. Julie said plainly at the start that she wasn’t feeling hopeful and came back later with what I think a lot of us felt in our bodies.
I’m struggling between surviving horizon one in my corporate job and trying to be more of who I am and reaching to three.
— Julie Ostrow
That’s the squeeze, isn’t it. Maija named the other half of it — that some of us are stranded on our own islands of the third horizon, fluent in the language of hope but cut off from one another. Which is the whole reason to gather. In the last Salon we talked about needing to be indigestible: something the algorithm can’t scrape, one-to-one human contact that’s almost subversive now. Coming together like this is itself the act.
I don’t want to make the day tidier than it was. Kerri asked the question I had no clean answer to: when an under-resourced community does real futures work — she’s in Muskegon Heights — how do you keep that hope from being co-opted, institutionalized, gentrified by the better-resourced partners you still need? Bill didn’t pretend there’s a general solution. He was candid that philanthropy, which ought to be the sector willing to stake out genuinely new territory, tends instead to be backward-looking and risk-averse, run within the very assumptions it should be challenging. We sat with that. I don’t think we resolved it.
But I left the way I’d hoped to. One thing Bill and the horizons keep teaching me is that there’s always a first horizon — the work is learning which parts to hold onto and which to release, and watching your future vision slowly become your present one. Hope, in that frame, isn’t something you locate. It’s something you pattern. We’re going to come back to this in a few months and see where we are.
That’s what this Salon is for.
Threads from the conversation
The framework. Three Horizons isn’t a graph over time. It’s three modes of awareness — responsibility, imagination, opportunity — alive in every present moment.
The reframe. Hope isn’t optimism or prediction. It’s an orientation of the spirit, and its true opposite is despair, not worry.
The discipline. Hope has to be charged, not found. It begins with agency — and with recognizing that we are not the patterns we’re part of.
The scale. Like being “indigestible,” the work starts small and human — in daily life, on the block, across the islands of hope we too often inhabit alone.
Read the notes, review the deliverables, and listen to the Deep Dive podcast in the Notebook.
Watch the full conversation (69 min) on Fathom
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Explore Bill Sharpe’s Three Horizons work and the Patterning of Hope podcast.
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I’ll admit I was a little proud today. Bill Sharpe has spent decades developing Three Horizons — the framework that quietly underwrites much of how I’ve come to think about the future — and having him in the room felt less like hosting a guest than like sitting down at the source of a river I’ve been drinking from for years.