How can we develop strategies and long-range plans that maximize our success across a wide range of possible futures?
How can we reduce uncertainty and manage risk?
How can we identify emerging opportunities and threats before our competitors do?
The Foresight Maturity Model will guide you in building an organization that optimizes foresight capabilities to provide:
A deeper, wider view of the operating environment
Alerts to potential new opportunities
Early warning of emerging threats
Tools to identify and manage uncertainty and risk
Understanding of future consumers and the forces that will shape them
The ability to anticipate the emergence of new competitors
What is It?
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.
The Foresight Maturity Model was developed by Terry Grim.
Foresight Maturity Model Workshop
Foresight Alliance will provide you or your team with a one-day, hands-on orientation to the model and the many ways it can benefit you.
Foresight Maturity Model Survey
A simple, convenient tool created by Foresight Alliance to enable organizations to establish a baseline and plan for developing powerful internal foresight capacities.
Download the Foresight Maturity Model
The model is available for your personal use. Please note that it is copyrighted and any use must include the copyright notice and proper attribution.
What is Foresight?
Strategic foresight is a powerful aid to improving decision-making, developing more robust strategies, and uncovering new opportunities and threats.
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