This case study focuses on how the Future Gens team used the 3 Horizons framework initially – to help shape and write our Future Generations Report 2020.
Summary of Use:
Lead Organization/Sponsor: Office of the Future Generations Commissioner in Wales
At the Office of the Future Generations Commissioner, we have used 3 Horizons extensively, both within our own internal work, but also as part of our training offer to public sector organisations in Wales.
This has led to both the Future Gens team using the framework regularly, for example, to shape our Future Generations Report 2020 and to assess staff wellbeing offer, but also to external impact and use in other public sector organisations like national bodies and health boards.
This case study focuses on how the Future Gens team used the 3 Horizons framework initially – to help shape and write our Future Generations Report 2020.
Purpose: The purpose was to explore large and complex policy areas in order to frame the various sections of our Future Generations Report 2020. We ran 9 Three Horizons workshops on each of our areas of focus at the time – Housing, Transport, Land Use Planning, Skills for the Future, Alternative Models of Health, Adverse Childhood Experiences, Decarbonisation, Budgets, and Procurement. The aim was to identify what didn’t work in the present, what our ideal vision for the future was, and what were the innovations and steps that could push us towards our desired vision.
Participants: The majority of the Future Generations team participated in all workshops. We also invited external partners to the workshops to ensure they were feeding into the discussion. Later on, we shared our draft sections with multiple stakeholders to test the vision and recommendations we had identified in the workshops. A full list of the people and organisations involved is available here.
Context: The Future Generations Report 2020 was the first iteration of a statutory report, which the Future Gens Cymru team has to produce every 5 years. The report is future-focussed in that it needs to include our assessment of what public service organisations in Wales need to do to better implement their duties under the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015. It is also the biggest piece of advice the Future Gens Cymru team produces and, as such, needed to be produced in a way that demonstrated the need for change, and the vision of where we want to get to, before diving into our recommendations.
Use Experience:
We wanted to make sure that everyone didn’t just participate but also gained experience facilitating, so we used the different workshops as an opportunity to upskill ourselves – a different person led each of the 9 sessions.
As the topics were very different, we found some of the conversations (Transport, Housing etc.) much easier with our points and ideas being easier to formulate, than in others (Procurement and Budget).
Horizon 1 was fairly easy to get into as we all had a fairly good idea of the need for change. At times, it was slightly overwhelming how much is going wrong within our systems and how little fit for purpose they were. It was beneficial to have very distinct perspectives from different team members who worked in very different policy areas as we could integrate and dig deeper into the root causes of some of the issues.
Horizon 3 was always the most enjoyable, although we found it hard to come up with a compelling and moving vision of what Procurement and Budgeting of the future would look like. We went about it slightly differently, trying to illustrate what the impacts of a future-fit procurement system would look like rather than digging into the detail of the system itself too much.
Horizon 2 was the most challenging and this is where we continued the work after the workshops themselves – in the workshops we identified good practice, rather than very specific steps for change. We peppered these good practice cases throughout the report and then used the ideas as a starting point for recommendations.
Horizons 2+ and 2- we found extremely helpful as we could challenge ourselves on our assumptions and pick out only the true innovations that could lead us to our desired Horizon 3.
Impact:
The application of the Three Horizons Framework during the development of our Future Generations Report has helped us with:
- Upskilling our team in long-term thinking: As we used a rotating basis for facilitation and most of us participated in the majority of workshops, we ended up being quite familiar and confident with the framework – we have since offered facilitation and training to other public sector organisations on it.
- A challenging yet positive framing of issues: Using the 3 Horizons framework enabled us to lead with the hopeful and purposeful lens – setting out the vision of what we want to achieve alongside the critical issues that we need to address. It also led us to peppering out good examples and innovations throughout, which has been praised by stakeholders.
- Regular use of the tool to help us frame other conversations: Since the report-writing, we have used the tool extensively in other projects to help us make big, challenging topics more manageable and frame our conversations in a challenging, but productive light.
Find out more:
Link to the full report is here.
