Three horizons

Secret Weapon #018

08 September 2025

Strategy work often involves looking into the future and thinking about the trajectory you want to see for your product, company or country.

The future typically gets more uncertain the further ahead you look. And the different actions required to keep you on the right path will likely vary as things progress too.

So when it’s time to communicate where you want to go and how you plan to get there, it can be helpful to draw a picture spanning three horizons:

• Short term: the things right in front of you, usually well understood
• Medium term: things a bit further out, may not be obvious
• Longer term: things very far out, often speculative or stretch goals

How far out you pitch these horizons depends a lot on the problem being analysed and the sort of discussion you’re trying to facilitate. I’ve worked on projects that looked out over 3 / 6 / 12-month horizons, and others that operated with timescales closer to 1 year / 3-5 years / 10+ years.

Whatever time horizons you consider, for each phase it’s good practice to separate out descriptive content from prescriptive content. The former encapsulates the key features of the world that you are hoping for or expect to see; the latter articulates the “so what” or the actions that need to be taken.

In some instances, descriptive content alone can be enough. This 10-year roadmap from Facebook’s 2016 F8 developer conference is a classic of the genre, with each horizon both distinct and contributing to a compelling overall story.

And one last tip: as with other forms of scenario work, giving each horizon a snappy name often helps too :) Good luck!