Week 21 Day 4: Horizon 3 -- What We Are Dreaming About

Horizon 3 is the leader's domain. It contains the long-term vision, the strategic possibilities, and the 'what if' questions that shape the team's direction over the next year or more. Horizon 3 should live in the leader's mind, in planning documents, and in occasional team discussions about the future. It should not live in the team's daily awareness. Horizon 3 items that leak into team conversations create anxiety because they are too abstract to act on and too uncertain to plan for.

Here is the mistake I see most frequently with Horizon 3. The leader gets excited about a future possibility and shares it with the team -- not as a formal priority, but as a 'heads up' or 'something I am thinking about.' The leader intends this as information sharing. The team interprets it as a signal that their current work may become irrelevant. 'The boss mentioned she is exploring a new market segment. Does that mean our current product is being abandoned?' 'He said he is thinking about restructuring the team around different product areas. Should I be worried about my role?' Horizon 3 ideas are inherently destabilizing when shared too early or too casually. The antidote is containment. Horizon 3 discussions belong in specific forums -- quarterly strategy sessions, annual planning, leadership offsites -- not in casual Slack messages or one-on-one tangents. When you share a Horizon 3 idea, explicitly label it: 'This is a Horizon 3 thought -- I am exploring it but there is no decision here. Your current work is unaffected. I will let you know when this moves to Horizon 2.' That labeling costs you one sentence and saves the team weeks of unnecessary anxiety.

The destabilizing effect of premature Horizon 3 disclosure is explained by Uncertainty Reduction Theory (Berger and Calabrese, 1975), which posits that humans experience discomfort when they encounter information that increases uncertainty about their environment, and they respond by seeking additional information, often through rumor and speculation. In organizational contexts, Bordia et al. (2004) found that strategic ambiguity from leadership increased rumor prevalence by 300% and reduced productivity by 12-18% during periods of perceived uncertainty. The labeling technique addresses what psychologists call 'appraisal theory of emotion' (Lazarus, 1991) -- the finding that emotional responses to events are determined not by the events themselves but by how they are appraised. By explicitly labeling an idea as Horizon 3 with no current impact, the leader provides an appraisal frame that prevents the anxiety response. Research by DiFonzo and Bordia (2007) on organizational rumor demonstrates that the most effective rumor prevention strategy is 'proactive communication' -- providing context and framing before information reaches informal channels. The instruction to contain Horizon 3 discussions in specific forums reflects what March (1991) calls the 'garbage can model of organizational choice' -- in the absence of structured decision forums, problems, solutions, and participants combine unpredictably, leading to decisions (or anxieties) that have no logical connection to the current organizational state.