Creating Intentional Futures – Three Horizons and Challenge Mapping

Abstract

At The Yunus Centre, Griffith University we’re committed to building capabilities around impact literacy, which necessarily involves engaging with the messy nature of change.
The Centre believes that visual representations are key to increasing engagement, enhancing understanding, and improving retention of key concepts and practices.

“…unless our words, concepts, ideas are hooked onto an image, they will go in one ear, sail through the brain, and go out the other ear. Words are processed by our short-term memory where we can only retain about seven bits of information (plus or minus 2) […]. Images, on the other hand, go directly into long-term memory where they are indelibly etched.” (Burmark, Visual Literacy, 2002)

The Yunus Centre use imagery and graphics throughout its work and have decided to surface them more intentionally through this series as a way to contribute to greater understanding and engagement with the emergent ideas being explored.

This piece is part of Yunus Centre’s Visualising Change series, written in October 2021.

For an introduction to the series, and to access other pieces as they become available, look for the tab on the Yunus publication.

The focus is on two tools used fairly regularly — Three Horizons and Challenge Mapping (otherwise known as mission mapping¹), and on a new iteration that brings them together.

Using them in this way the aim is to create stronger bridges between “what’’ and “how’’ when organising for change.