Spectrum — helping organizations build the teams they need to innovate.
A physical workshop method created at SAP AppHaus to answer a question most enterprise teams never stop to ask: do we have the right people to do what we’re trying to do? Four phases, a canvas, a card system, and a facilitation guide. Built once. Adopted globally.
Innovation doesn’t fail for lack of ideas. It fails for lack of alignment.
In large organizations, teams form around headcount and org charts, not around a shared purpose. People work in parallel, not together. Innovation initiatives run from multiple departments, with different cultures and incompatible definitions of success. Design sprints pile up, outputs stack, but the underlying question (who are we, what are we here to do, and do we have the right people to do it) never gets asked out loud.
The brief that led to Spectrum came from inside SAP’s own innovation practice. AppHaus was running workshops with enterprise clients who were trying to build design capacity internally, and kept running into the same wall: great intent, wrong team composition. Spectrum was built to address that gap before the work started, not after it failed.
Four phases. One canvas. A room that walks out different.
Spectrum runs in four phases. Each one builds directly on the previous, and each produces a concrete artefact posted on the shared canvas, so the team can see their thinking accumulate in real time, on the wall, in their own words.
Phase 01
Why
Shared vision and mission. The team defines where it wants to go and what it stands for, before discussing roles or structure.
Phase 02
What
Mission mapping. The mission statement is broken down across three innovation dimensions (desirability, feasibility, viability), revealing the team’s intended focus.
Phase 03
Who Does What
Talent mapping. Each person places themselves on the same diagram. The gap between mission intent and current team composition becomes visible and discussable.
Phase 04
How
Team culture. The group agrees on three shared values using a picture card system: concrete, visual, and harder to game than abstract principles.
The physical format was deliberate. Cards, not slides. A canvas on the wall, not a deck. Something you can photograph and pin up for months. The discussions that happen around physical objects are qualitatively different from ones held in front of a presentation: slower, more honest, harder to skip.
Built once. Used everywhere.
Spectrum was designed to run without the author in the room. The full toolkit (canvas, card decks, facilitation guide) was packaged so that any trained moderator could run it independently. That was the condition for it to scale.
From 2019, it was adopted across SAP’s global AppHaus network. Over 200 practitioners ran Spectrum workshops with enterprise clients across Europe, the Americas, and APAC. The moderator manual I wrote for it became the standard reference for new facilitators, covering room setup, agenda, phase-by-phase guidance, and edge cases.
The method continues to be used. Some of the teams who went through it in 2019 and 2020 still have the canvas on their wall.
