Three Perspectives on Futures
The Three Perspectives on Futures are a thinking tool that sorts a group's images of the future: projected-official, plausible-alternative and absurd-utopian. It makes silent assumptions open to discussion and gives strategic debates a shared language. The three categories help keep the expected, the possible and the daring apart. The futurist Jonas Drechsel developed it.
At the EU’s Joint Research Centre, officials filled in a table on futures of participation in the EU, starting with the official ones. The pressure to complete the table led them all the way to the absurd-utopian column, and there they suddenly dreamed of driving through the EU in a camper van and reaching out to citizens.
As a workshop, the format has run for Slow Mobility in Culture in 2022, the foundation of a well-known NGO, the Illustratoren Organisation, Velptec and HS Kempten, among others.
It condenses Bill Sharpe’s Three Horizons model, UNESCO’s Futures Literacy Lab and Joseph Voros’s futures cone.
Guiding questions
- What is the future elephant in the room that rarely gets talked about?
- Which developments count as realistic once the view widens?
- Which places of longing can we imagine, beyond the probable?
Sources and references
- The Three Horizons model (Bill Sharpe), UNESCO's Futures Literacy Lab and Joseph Voros's futures cone
- The format condenses all three