Articles
Introducing Prism
Jaimes Nel
2026-09-21
We've developed a new service called Prism, based on a simple framework that helps you quickly assess your innovation landscape, identify gaps and evolve your strategic perspective.
Articles
Jaimes Nel
2026-09-21
We've developed a new service called Prism, based on a simple framework that helps you quickly assess your innovation landscape, identify gaps and evolve your strategic perspective.
We're introducing a new service called Prism.
Prism is a 90m workshop that helps you quickly assess your innovation landscape, identify gaps and evolve your strategic perspective.
It works by turning a conversation into a heatmap of risks and opportunities, giving you a clear view of where you need to focus.
You get a first pass outcome immediately at the end of the workshop, organised in a framework that lets you further refine the scores if you want, or simply use the outcomes to take the action you need to.
Late last year, we were deep in a workshop to define the future direction of an existing service. We were learning as we went about the service, the capabilities that enable it and the customers it supports.
It's challenging to help a team work through what they need to do next, with careful discussion of all the relevant considerations and constraints, whilst avoiding getting too deep in the weeds on any one topic.
What helped was a simple sketch that kept us focused on what's important with three simple questions:
Looking at the challenge through each of these lenses helped turn the session into an actionable conversation.
We described what we knew about each question, and evaluated the risks and opportunities associated with each.
This helped us quickly see the gaps, where we already knew what to do, and where we needed to talk more.
It really helped having a simple frame to come back to - where are we, what do we believe and what can we do next?
Keeping it simple and conversational helped the conversation move quickly - we didn't need everything resolved, we just needed to know where the gaps where.
Once we realised the lenses were helpful, we tried to find a clear way to map what each lens illuminated.
Like any framework, this will evolve over time. This is what Prism currently describes:
Position
Perspective
Potential
Since developing the framework, we've created a tool to help us to rapidly evaluate your innovation ecosystem by scoring your risks and opportunities across each of these dimensions.
Prism lets us create a heatmap of where your key issues are, helping you skip past what's already agreed and focus your attention where further discussion is needed, within a single conversation.
The key insight behind Prism is that the most important thing is often to find focus quickly. The detail can evolve over time, once we're no longer blocked by trying to work out where to start.
Prism always starts light, with a conversation and three lenses that can be sketched on a napkin.
There are two ways to use Prism right now.
We offer a 90m Prism Assessment workshop using the framework to explore your ecosystem and highlight risks and opportunities.
You get a scored report by the end of the conversation.
Within two days we'll share a designed poster version of the key outcomes.
Prism is great for:
We've also created an online version that you can try right now. It only takes a couple of minutes to complete and you'll get a high-level heatmap and some helpful clarity on where to focus.