The Foresight Maturity Model is a set of best practices that ensure that your organization develops a robust, useful, and comprehensive approach to take charge of your future.

  • A numerical assessment tool for benchmarking, goal setting, and tracking
  • A proven framework for managing risk
  • A hands-on, results-oriented approach

The model divides foresight activities into six disciplines:

  • Leadership: Clear ownership and active leadership to implement and institutionalize foresight capability
  • Framing: Establishing the boundaries and scope of the endeavor
  • Scanning: Collection of appropriate and relevant information in a format and timeframe that support useful retrieval
  • Forecasting: Description of long-term outcomes that contrast with the present to enable better decision-making
  • Visioning: Creation of a preferred future that imaginatively captures values and ideals
  • Planning: Ensuring that the plans, people, skills, and processes support the organizational vision

Each discipline is defined by three to five explicit practices. Within an organization, each practice (and thus each discipline) may be assigned to one of five levels of maturity.

The Foresight Maturity Model was developed by Terry Grim while at Social Technologies. It is based on the work of leading futurists and the best practices that they have achieved in working with thousands of clients. The basis for the organization of this work can be found in Thinking About the Future, a book by Andy Hines and Dr. Peter Bishop.

The model was also introduced at the 2008 meeting of the World Future Society and at the 2008 Army War College Proteus foresight conference. For more detail about the model, see Terry Grim, “Foresight Maturity Model (FMM): Achieving Best Practices in the Foresight Field,” Journal of Futures Studies, May 2009, 13(4): 69-80.

Terry has broad experience with maturity models. She served as a member of IBM’s NASA Space team, where the maturity model was used extensively to ensure high-quality software engineering and software development practices for launch and mission-critical software. Later, she applied the same methodology to develop the Strategy Maturity Model at IBM.

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