The Patterning of Hope - a movement for universal future consciousness

Article written by Bill Sharpe, the creator of the Three Horizons framework and the facilitator of The Patterning of Hope online course

How are we to act in the face of the existential risks we face? How can we meet the uncertainty and complexity of the future with hope?

If we are all to live well and thrive on one planet we must bring about profound changes in our ways of life 🌎

Coming out of my work with colleagues in the International Futures Forum and H3Uni, Three Horizons offers a simple and powerful shared language and practice for convening the future. It naturally encourages a view of the patterns of life and our role in sustaining or changing them, and brings people together to get into action from a perspective of hope.

Over the last two decades we’ve been teaching and sharing this practice and it is now being widely used internationally across all sectors. As part of these initiatives I’ve worked with my wonderful colleague Yasu Mali at Leaders’ Quest to deliver training to hundreds of policymakers, researchers, business leaders, philanthropists, and activists to use Three Horizons in service of a better world, working in diverse fields, from conservation to child health.

As Yasu moves on to widen her practice in the world, we decided to have a series of conversations, reflecting on our years of working together and exploring the underlying qualities of awareness that support the use of Three Horizons in bringing about the transformative change that we need.

Bill and Yasu

Two themes run through these conversations: future consciousness, and the patterning of hope:

✨ Future consciousness is an awareness of the future potential of the present moment; it is our innate ability to embody the renewal of life, each of us in our own unique way.

🔄 The patterning of hope is how we bring that ability into the re-patterning of our collective lives to support transformative change.

In this learning journey, each week we share a recorded conversation exploring these themes, together with a bonus episode in which I offer a practice to support your engagement with the ideas we’ve discussed, and then there is the opportunity to join a live session with me to share your reflections and ask questions.

Yasu will join me in the first live session to share her own journey in this work, and for the final session I am delighted that I will be joined by Daniel Wahl. Daniel has influenced much of my thinking and is helping me see how we bring this work into the wider field of regenerative futures and bio-regional practice.

My goal in this work is to create a movement for universal future consciousness, in which every person is a unique source of transformative insight and human potential, equipped to hold the conversations we need to re-pattern our lives with hope.

Here are the themes of the 8 weeks:

1) Three Horizons and the Patterning of Hope
Live session guest Yasu Mali

2) Seeing everything as patterns: holism with focus

3) Identifying ecosystems for change

4) Time, imagination and future consciousness

5) What's love got to do with it?

6) Dilemma navigation: being-as-self and being-as-part-of-the-whole

7) Transformation: imaginal cells and shifting patterns

8) A universal practice: an invitation to pattern hope
Live session guest Daniel Wahl

I hope you feel inspired to join this learning journey with us!

Sign up here!