The Three Horizons of working together
Thinking about the collaborative tools that define today, tomorrow, and beyond.
How we work together is evolving. Teams are using more and more tools to collaborate - some of which are cutting-edge, some of which are very similar to what we were using in the early 2000’s. To use the classic William Gibson quote, the future is here - it’s just not distributed evenly.
But how do we begin to make sense of these tools? What tools are here to stay, and what will the collaboration technologies of tomorrow look like? Knowing this could give forward-thinking organisations the cutting-edge, and allow them to massively increase their productivity and team cohesion.
This is where the Three Horizons model can help - a framework developed by International Futures Forum. It helps organisations and practitioners understand that they need to focus simultaneously on the work they’re focusing on today - while creating the capabilities they’ll need for tomorrow. In short, there are three horizons - H1, H2, and H3:
H1 / Horizon 1 is ‘business as usual’ - characterised by innovations that maintain and reinforce our current paradigms. H1 - in this model - is on the out; destined to be (mostly) replaced by H2 innovations as they become more effective than H1 practices.
H2 / Horizon 2 is the ‘world in transition’ - where many entrepreneurs and creatives spend most of their time. It’s a space of innovations with technological, economic, and cultural viability that disrupt the status quo and get us closer to H3.
H3 / Horizon 3 is how we envision a ‘viable world’ - it’s often very big picture, low on details, but conveys the fundamentals we hope to see in an ideal future. It is informed by social, ecological, economic, cultural and technological experiments happening today - the future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed.
So - what does it look like to apply this framework when thinking about tools that help us work together?
📣 Horizon 1: Communication
For over a decade now, we’ve been throttling the innovation out of communication tooling. We've gone from email, to messaging channels, to video calling - with the mass-adoption of the latter two accelerated by certain events in 2020 especially.
These technologies all reinforce whatever cultural paradigms you sit within; their implementation is unlikely to have a big impact on the culture or collaborative potential of your team. It might increase their collaborative capacity - but the ceiling remains at the same height.
These tools improve the density and richness of communication, but they rarely act as effective stores of information (we all love scrolling back through Slack threads to find that one message from 4 months ago), and a lot of context lives off-platform, making it hard to piece together the full story most of the time.
When I think about Horizon 1 tools for working together, I think about…
H1 is dominated by a few large players who have outlasted the competition; having been the primary provider of their core offering for a solid amount of time.
Many customers are entirely reliant on these tools to conduct their business
We see these large players all clambering for H2 innovations as they become a sure-bet
Communication tooling will always be needed - and the field will continue to develop in it’s own right (see you in the metaverse) - but it’s already being supplanted by Horizon 2, as highlighted by the last point above. Which brings us to…
Horizon 2: Cooperation
As communication tooling has matured, a new product category has begun to flourish (read that in a David Attenborough voice). Tools designed to help people cooperate; allowing teams to store and share information with ease, assign and group tasks, and work together in shared digital spaces that have a richer UI than the simple chat-and-call communication tools of H1.
I see Horizon 2 as consisting of a few broad feature groups: shared documenting, white-boarding, and in a slightly different niche, project / team management.
H2 is where managers are looking for ways to improve the productivity of their team, and are willing to try some new things to make it happen; provided it doesn’t change too much at once.
H2 tools give everyone in a team the ability to not just communicate, but contribute - albeit with a lot of context still left in the aether.
Many players in this space have recently demonstrated a concerted effort to bring what’s historically been a web of disconnected contexts under one roof. There’s a really clear push from a lot of players in this space to become an All-in-One, or “AIO” solution. Slack has a document feature, Notion lets you manage projects, and Monday has a white-boarding space. This is what happens at the intersection of H1 and H2, as the big players vie for market dominance.
On the other side of things, sitting at the intersection between H2 and H3, we’re seeing a contrasting approach centred around interconnectivity. I’m really excited by this, and I’ll get into it more in H3.
Here’s what I think about when picturing H2 in the context of tools that help people work together:
There’s a high density of competition, but a diminishing level of differentiation between the competition
New entrants still stand somewhat of a chance in this space - if they bring something unique to the table (innovating within boundaries of the horizon)
H2 tools begin to blur the lines of traditional power structures in teams, but the foundational elements are still there. For example, they allow massively increased transparency between teams, but don’t do anything in and of themselves to encourage collaboration between those teams.
Which of course leads us to…
Horizon 3: Collaboration
Horizon 3 is where the fun is. This is the bleeding-edge of innovation when we think about how technology can help us work together. Tools in this space have a huge focus on distributing power and influence, improving decision making processes, and tightening social bonds within teams. These tools all place people back into the centre; helping teams collaborate in the truest sense of the word.
Some might make an argument that Horizon 3 can’t include any examples of tools that exist today by it’s definition - and they have a point. This is a space dominated less so by tools and more so by think tanks, research centres, and communities of practice - all imagining that viable future that defines H3. But I think there are some really interesting examples of tooling out there. They’re often short-lived, small, and as such hard to find - but they’re there. Just not evenly distributed.
Murmur
Murmur was a decision-making platform that closed up shop and went open-source in August of 2024 (rest in peace). It allowed teams to develop policies, norms, and even their roles - all collaboratively.
Team members could make proposals, which would go through a three-stage process: Questions, Feedback, and Decision. There were a bunch of different agreement types you could make, from foundational agreements centred around purpose and principles, all the way to process-focused agreements around onboarding and hiring. There were also categories for norms (habits and rituals), and one-off decisions.
I believe Murmur was well ahead of it’s time - and it’s one of the best tools I’ve seen for distributed decision-making and self-managed organisations.
Aaron Dignan, the co-founder, has written a fantastic book on innovative work practices call Brave New Work - I highly recommend you check it out.
Atlas
I was a bit torn about including Atlas as an example of an H3 tool, because it’s owned and operated by the almost quintessential example of an H1 organisation; Atlassian. Atlassian runs not just one, but many of the largest and most dominant teamwork tools in the world - Trello, Jira, Confluence - their tools have millions of global users, and have done so for decades.
But Atlas is different. It’s so fringe that you really need to dig for it on their website - it’s not on their featured list of products, and they don’t target it to any specific user segment. But it has the potential - if they can market it right and continue to invest in it - to become one of their largest products. I think.
Atlas is a teamwork directory with a huge focus on platform integration and goal alignment. It integrates seamlessly with other Atlassian tools, but it also plugs in to third party platforms like Slack and Teams. In the app itself, you can bundle projects into the goals they serve, see what everyone is working on, keep a log of key decisions, and more.
Atlas will be an interesting one to keep an eye on - in many ways it sits at the bridge between H2 and H3, making it a potential giant in the future.
Clarity
Clarity is a collaborative team workspace for decentralised teams - and it’s one of the best examples I’ve seen of web3 in action.
At it’s core, Clarity is what you’d get if Notion and Trello had a baby. It’s project and document management rolled into one, and it has some incredible additional features. Clarity includes bounties for jobs-to-be-done, token-based access to groups, roles, and documents, and an amazing set of information discovery features that make collaborating in a complex environment much more effective. ‘
Clarity has the most potential out of any tool I’ve seen to allow total strangers to work together effectively - because it bakes incentive models and permissioning into the DNA of the app.
Horizon 3 tools in this space have a tendency to be incredibly inter-operable. For the most part, they have really deep connectivity with other platforms - either through web3, or a huge focus on integrating other apps through API.
I love this approach, as it creates an ecosystem and turns potential competitors into cooperators. This is what I mentioned earlier in the H2 segment - and I believe it’s an H3 trait because I associate network effects and ecosystem creation with H3 values and principles more than H2.
When I think about H3 Tools, I think…
Technology at H3 is often considered ‘opinionated’; forcing users to adopt ways of thinking that are well-outside convention.
H3 tools are often working to create a demand rather than meet it; convincing people over time that the problem they solve is a problem, and that it can be solved.
H3 Tools, because they’re the last horizon, have no upper limit - the variety of offering in this space is massive, even if the density is fairly low. I only covered a narrow range of examples, but here are a few more:
Greater Than - a collective that works to support organisations with internal systems change
Beyond the Rules - an initiative started by Dark Matter Labs to imagine how we can step out of the current rules, norms, and laws that hold us in our current system.
Danish Design Center - Denmark’s national center for Design does a lot of amazing systems work.
Enspiral are worldwide OG’s in this space - and luckily they’re based locally in Wellington.
Plurality, and indeed a lot of Audrey Tangs work with vTaiwan etc.
Pol.is, Consider.it and other deliberation tools have the potential to massively improve how democracy is done, and how we work together not as teams, but as communities.
Closing thoughts
The three horizons model can be a useful tool to help think about the pace of change a field or industry is operating at, what might lie ahead for it, and in what order innovations are likely to take place. But it’s worth noting that this is by no means a linear process, and it is possible to regress - especially when thinking about H3.
Supermesh is built with the values of H3, but the practicality of H2. We want to make it absolutely clear who does what in your team, and help you make decisions effectively through that. People deserve to work together well - and it’s clear that technology can support that to happen.