AAM’s Center for the Future of Museums (CFM) helps museums explore the cultural, political and economic challenges facing society and devise strategies to shape a better tomorrow. CFM is a think-tank and research and design lab for fostering creativity and helping museums transcend traditional boundaries to serve society in new ways.

What is the need?

• In order to thrive, grow and continue to provide vital services to society, museums need to be prepared to respond to massive changes that will take place in the 21^st century.
• The communities which museums serve, and society as a whole, will be challenged by these changes.
• Museums, as vital community resources, can be essential partners in meeting these challenges and creating a healthy, stable society in which every person has the leisure and ability to enjoy what museums have to offer.

— Philip Crosby, Reflections on Quality

How does CFM help?

CFM:

• Helps museums foresee long-term changes 25-50 years in the future that will profoundly affect society, their communities, their audiences and their own institutions
• Provokes discussion of the direction in which museums want to shape this prospective future, and how to accomplish these changes
• Builds connections with experts and innovative thinkers outside the museum field to solicit their knowledge and perspectives, both on what museums can be doing to help society and how museums can address future
• Provides a forum for the best and brightest from the museum field and from other sectors to share ideas and explore joint solutions to these challenges

The goal of forecasting is not to predict the future but to tell you what you need to know to take meaningful action in the present.

                   —Paul Saffo