Established model
Three horizons
Baghai, Coley & White · 1999
Separating the business you are running from the one you are building and the one you are only betting on.
Its place in the frameworkGoal Core›Long term goals
What it does
Horizon one defends and extends what already earns; horizon two builds what is emerging; horizon three places options on what might exist later. Each needs different funding, different measures and different people, and the model exists because judging all three by the first one’s standards kills the other two every time.
- Reach for it when
- When long-term goals and this quarter’s numbers are being argued in the same meeting with the same yardstick.
- Where it stops
- The horizons are a way of talking, not a portfolio theory. Nothing in it says how much belongs in each, and it is easily used to protect pet projects from any measurement at all.
Mehrdad Baghai, Stephen Coley & David White, The Alchemy of Growth, Perseus, 1999.
Why it sits at Long term goals
The far horizon: where the organisation intends to be in years rather than quarters. Long term goals give the short ones a direction to point in, and are the first thing to go missing when a company is busy.
A model is only useful when you reach for it at the right moment. This one answers a question that arises here — so it is filed here, and nowhere else. These are the working areas it serves:
- Long-range ambitionCollins & Porras on the long-range goal: a clear finish line, a long horizon, and roughly a seventy per cent sense that it can be done.
- Growth horizonsThe three-horizons model set out in The Alchemy of Growth (Baghai, Coley & White).
- Direction of growthAnsoff’s growth matrix, still the clearest way of distinguishing four quite different kinds of bet.
- Assumptions and scenariosScenario-planning practice, developed at Shell, on rehearsing several futures rather than forecasting one.
What it touches elsewhere
Nothing in a business is decided on its own. A conclusion reached with this model at Long term goals lands in these other cores, whether or not anyone follows it there.
- Vision CoreThe vision describes the future state; long term goals are the measurable steps into it.
- Market CoreDirection of growth is a claim about markets, and has to be checked against them.
- Time CoreMarket timing and golden opportunities decide when a long goal becomes reachable.
Filed at the same place
These answer questions that arise at Long term goals too. Where they disagree with this one, the disagreement is the useful part.
- The big hairy audacious goalA single long-range goal clear enough to need no explanation and large enough to change the company on the way.
Elsewhere in Goal Core
These are other people’s models, named here so you can go to the source and use them properly. The Omnigoal is not affiliated with their authors and is not endorsed by them; nothing of theirs is reproduced here — no canvas, no diagram, no wording. Each is described in our own words, with the originator credited, because the framework is a place to put thinking, not a replacement for the people who did it. Model names and trademarks belong to their respective owners and are used here only to refer to the work itself.
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