A free workshop instrument
Two linked canvases for building innovation capability under uncertainty. One maps where your organisation is heading. The other plans a single partnership in enough detail that it survives contact with reality. Every field carries a worked example you can borrow or switch off.
What this is
The gap is rarely the deal. It is that the deal was never tested against a strategic question, and nobody agreed what would count as success before the search began.
Altitude one
Five sectors around a single uncertainty: what you are watching, where you will play, whose capability you need, what changes in how people work, and how it survives the person who started it. Then an alignment check, because sectors filled one at a time tend to contradict each other.
Altitude two
Seven stages, from framing the future the need lives in, through the brief, the search, the deal and the governance, to the handoff into operations and the decision to scale or stop. Each stage has a gate you have to answer out loud.
The link
Each canvas says which of your named signals it serves, so the coverage grid shows what has three partnerships chasing it and what has none. When a partnership ends, its lesson writes back to the compass. That is what makes this a capability rather than two worksheets.
Who it is for
You have partnerships. What you do not have is a brief they were all tested against.
You are asked to innovate with partners and audited on how you chose them.
Used from bachelor level to executive MBA, against a live case or a published one.
A keynote ends with inspiration. This is the object people take back to the office.
How to use it
Fill the compass. Start at the centre with the uncertainty, then name up to three signals in Scan. Do it alone or in pairs before anyone debates it.
Five statements. The rows you cannot tick are the agenda for the next conversation, and they are worth more than the boxes you filled.
Set the direction first. Inbound if you need capability, outbound if you hold something idle, coupled if both. The direction rewrites the questions.
An unticked gate is information. If nobody can state the partner's reason to say yes in one sentence, you are not ready to negotiate.
With more than one canvas open, the grid shows which signals have nothing pointed at them and which partnerships serve nothing you named. Quarterly is enough.
Decide to scale, absorb, renegotiate, hand over or exit, then send the lesson back up to the compass so the next bearing is better than this one.
Three hours works well: compass and alignment check before the break, one canvas after it with the people who would actually own the partnership. Leave the last twenty minutes for the gates, out loud, one at a time. Nobody leaves without the PDF.
What you leave with
The export produces a landscape A3 pack: the compass on one sheet, each partnership on its own, and the coverage grid at the back. Answers print as full text, not clipped boxes. Choose “Save as PDF” in the print dialogue.
Everything stays in your browser on this device. Nothing is uploaded and there is no account. Clearing your browser data clears your work, so export before you close a session that mattered. Shared devices in a workshop each hold their own copy.
Altitude one — the organisation
Five sectors, one uncertainty at the centre. Fill it in a single sitting, check whether the parts agree with each other, and take the page with you.
Sectors are easy to fill one at a time and easy to leave contradicting each other. An unticked row is the most useful thing on the page.
Written back from the Renew stage of each canvas. This is what turns two worksheets into a loop.
Across both altitudes
One compass, several canvases. The grid shows which of your named signals each partnership serves, and which signals have nothing pointed at them.