Performance Prism
The Performance Prism measures a business through five stakeholder-facing questions - what stakeholders want, what they must give back, and whether your strategies, processes and capabilities actually deliver both - so performance is judged by more than the numbers shareholders care about.
Five spokes fan out from a centre point, each one a stakeholder question the business has to answer.
Reach for this when…
- Your dashboard is all financial and a real problem with staff, suppliers or the community isn't showing up anywhere.
- A stakeholder relationship is quietly deteriorating and nobody can point to the metric that would have caught it.
- You're rebuilding a scorecard and want stakeholder needs to shape it, not the other way round.
How to run it
- Name your key stakeholders: customers, employees, suppliers, investors, regulators, community.
- Define Stakeholder Satisfaction: what each group actually wants from you.
- Check Strategies: are they set up to deliver that satisfaction and secure the contribution you need back from each group.
- Check Processes and Capabilities: do you actually have the operational means to run those strategies.
- Define Stakeholder Contribution: what you need back from each group in return.
A worked example
Situation. Abena Owusu ran Owusu Clinics, a chain of primary care clinics in Accra, Ghana, that looked financially healthy while staff turnover quietly climbed.
Applied. Working through the five facets, she found employee satisfaction had never been named as a stakeholder need at all, and the strategies in place simply assumed staff would stay.
Result. She added a facet-specific retention strategy and reworked scheduling, the process directly under her control. Turnover fell within two quarters, before it showed up as a cost line anywhere.
The catch
Five facets and multiple stakeholder groups produce a lot of data to hold at once, and it's easy for the framework to become a reporting exercise rather than a decision tool. It also assumes stakeholder needs can be cleanly identified, when in practice different people within the same stakeholder group often want contradictory things.
If Stakeholder Contribution is empty for a group, you've defined a wish list, not a relationship.
Origin: Andy Neely, Chris Adams & Mike Kennerley (Cranfield School of Management)