Prism 2026: ProVision Refracts the Future

More than 400 delegates recently gathered at the Marriott Resort on the Gold Coast for three days of keynotes, panel discussions and workshops, a trade exhibition, and celebrations – all built around a single organising idea: that any one challenge, viewed properly, splits into a spectrum of possible answers.

Because of the conference focus, it attracts optometrists, practice managers, optical dispensers, and suppliers, with some businesses shutting their doors so that their entire staff can attend. For many, it’s seen as an opportunity to thank staff members for their loyalty, an opportunity to build on camaraderie, and reset the agenda.

Hosted by professional MC Yvonne Adele, the program opened with ProVision Chief Executive Officer Tony Jones, who explained the thinking behind this year’s theme: Prism 2026. Building on the 2024 conference theme of ‘Edge’, which explored competitive differentiation, Mr Jones said prismatic thinking was a cognitive approach that examined a single concept from multiple angles. “There’s never just one possibility when it comes to decision making or problem solving,” he said, encouraging members to step out of an operational mindset and consider their future practice journey “through the prism of possibilities”.

Mr Jones outlined ProVision’s future-proofing agenda: the recently launched flexible membership model, technology as a strategic enabler, including benchmarking through ProIntel and a newly developed artificial intelligence (AI) roadmap; stronger support for practice differentiation through pricing, service fees, and new patient generation; and a continued push to reduce small business complexity. Change, he said, was not coming – it is already here.

ProVision Board Chair Rowena Beckenham followed, turning the prism metaphor back on the profession itself. Prescribing prism, she noted, takes time, effort, and energy; it is not about selling spectacles quickly, but about customising care for the individual. That capacity to solve problems patient by patient, Ms Beckenham said, was the superpower of independent optometry and could not be replicated by anyone else in the commercial landscape. She welcomed new directors to the board, acknowledged the organisation’s long relationship with Optometry Australia (OA), and urged members to consider representation in OA’s forthcoming board elections.

Signals and the Horizon

Futurist Simon Waller delivered the first keynote, distinguishing his ‘slow futures’ work from the ‘fast futurism’ presentations often delivered on the conference-circuit. Having worked with the likes of Rio Tinto and Shell to test billion-dollar decisions against decades of change, he said his approach is “really about trying to understand what’s going on around us and use that to make better decisions in our business today”.

Mr Waller argued that our current sense of uncertainty is real rather than imagined, driven by time, control, and above all, complexity. To help deal with uncertainty and plan for the future, he offered three practical tools: ask a better, time-bound question (what will shape optometry in the next five years not 20); deliberately make space for deep thinking (“it’s the slow thinking brain, the deep thinking brain, the energy hungry brain… that deals with challenge”); and scan the horizon for signals – “the things in the environment that indicate how the future could be different from today… the things that make you go ‘hmm’”. He said in times of uncertainty, it’s important to scan the horizon even more often to observe signals for change.

A Panel on Navigating Independence

A fireside discussion on current challenges and opportunities for independent optometry ensued, chaired by Tony Jones with Optometry Australia Chief Executive Officer Mark Nevin, Rodenstock Global Marketing Manager Tina Bergner who had travelled from Germany, and ProVision director and long-standing member Michael Jones.

Mr Nevin discussed workforce oversupply, the sector’s dependence on bulk billing, and digital health as the key enabler allowing optometrists to share data with GPs, urgent care clinics, and ophthalmology. Ms Bergner urged practices to empower their teams for differentiation – mapping the patient journey, developing crisp elevator pitches for key products, and making lens competence visible in-store. “You don’t want to win the price fight,” she said. “You can turn it into a differentiation fight.” Michael Jones described auditing his own practice’s visibility in large language models as a wake-up call and reminded the room that independents’ nimbleness and personal connection remain their true advantage.

Breaking Through Fear

A keynote by big wave surfer Mark Visser closed the day but had delegates reflecting throughout the weekend. Mr Visser traced his journey from a near-drowning at age three to riding Pe’ahi, a Hawaiian surf break, more commonly known as ‘Jaws’ due to the size and ferocity of its swells that can reach up to 21 metres. He distilled the experience of planning, preparing for, and riding the wave in the depth of a night – not once but several times – into five lessons that can easily be applied to people in all walks of life: believe in yourself, do the work, surround yourself with great people, be a person of your word, and let go of fear.

The Digital Prism

The first keynote on day two came from Chief Marketing Officer and AI strategist Louise Cummins, founder of the Australian Centre for AI Marketing, who spoke on ‘AI powered practices: The digital prism’. Ms Cummins opened with a deliberate inversion of the usual anxiety. “Everybody talks about AI taking away our humanness,” she said. “I actually propose that it can be an opportunity to make us more human.”

Her argument was based on a simple observation about where time goes. AI is already in patients’ hands, Ms Cummins said – they arrive researched, informed, and impatient with friction, and they compare every practice to the most frictionless experience they have had that week. But the scarcest resource in a practice is not patients; it is uninterrupted time with the patient in front of you.

“AI’s first job should not be diagnosis,” she said. “It’s returning stolen hours.” Smarter recalls, waitlist offers triggered by cancellations, intake and consent captured conversationally before the visit, notes drafted with oversight – each removes administrative drag rather than clinical responsibility.

“But the more technology can do, the more human judgement, empathy, and care matter,” Ms Cummins said. She gave a personal example: her autistic son’s anxiety about his eyes, and an optometrist who read the moment and created a calm environment for him. AI, she said, will never do that. Nor is it self-correcting – “it is only ever as reliable as the information around it, and poor data produces fast, fluent, and sometimes wrong outputs. Judgement stays with the practitioner.”

Ms Cummins, who is consulting to ProVision on its digital strategy, said she was impressed by the approach of the executive team and board because the conversation had started with members, patients, and clinical outcomes rather than with the technology itself. ProVision is working through strategic governance first and will assess tools for privacy, security, integration, and healthcare suitability before recommending them, with guidance pitched at different levels of member confidence and readiness. That caution matters, she said, because when organisations move too slowly to give people approved tools, staff simply use their own: research suggests around 70% of corporate Australia is now using AI tools that have never been vetted, often free consumer versions, sometimes with sensitive data loaded into them. She said a measured approach is critical. “You’re not behind,” she told the room. “ProVision is at the front, in a considered way.”

The 5D Lens

Jacqui Scammell, founder and CEO of professional training company Service Q, followed with ‘The 5D Lens’, arguing that with AI levelling the competitive playing field, what remains as differentiation is human-to-human moments. Her 5D model – a pyramid of physical, cognitive, emotional, social, and spiritual dimensions – frames service as multidimensional, and leadership as creating the conditions for teams to deliver it.

“You’re not in the optometry industry,” she told delegates. “You’re in the connection business.” The point, she explained, is what the clinical work actually delivers. Restoring someone’s sight restores their connection to the world and the people in it. Practices give people clarity, possibility, and hope, and it is through that vehicle that trust and relationship are built. Reframing the work this way, she said, is a conversation worth having with teams now, because it changes how every touchpoint in the patient journey is valued.

She also urged practices to map their patient journey through four quadrants – the human moments they will protect and never outsource, those they could elevate, the clunky ones needing redesign, and the predictable, repeatable tasks that can safely be automated.

Shared Peer Learning

The afternoon belonged to ProVision’s Shared Peer Learning sessions – something members had been asking for – and easily among the most energising hours of the conference. Two facilitated streams ran in parallel: one for practice managers, one for optometry practice owners, each built around topics members had nominated in a pre-conference survey.

Some of the experiences shared were:

• A practice that ran a 16th anniversary celebration, splitting a AU$100 offer 50/50 with its lab partner and messaging lapsed patients alongside a Facebook campaign, recorded its best month ever.
• An owner who transformed his recruitment success rate by advertising part-time rather than full-time roles and interviewing for values rather than technical skill.
• Managers pairing each patient with an allocated optometrist and dispenser so nothing is dropped.
• ‘Happy calls’ made to patients a week after dispensing.

The rooms were loud, and deliberately so. As one facilitator put it, delegates were squeezing decades of different practice experience out of each other – and that, more than any single session, is what only a room full of independents can offer.

Interactions continued on the final day of the conference with a series of workshops led by Ms Adele, researcher and consultant Dr Adam Fraser, and leadership strategist Holly Ransom. Running in parallel and built around delegates sharing and brainstorming; the ideas generated carried into the afternoon’s main-stage sessions.

Micheal Knipe Address

Optometrist and former ProVision director Andrew Koch delivered this year’s Micheal Knipe address through story. He began on a New Zealand beach at age five, dragged out by a wave while clutching a glass bottle worth a penny on return. When his ‘expert’ older brother shouted at him to drop the bottle and swim he followed the advice. Sixty years later, Mr Koch realised his other brother – a strong swimmer – had been quietly standing, ready to rescue him if needed. “For 60 years, that safety net was hidden to me,” he said. It reframed a story of solitary survival into one about never actually being alone.

He then traced his years volunteering in Timor-Leste. During the early clinics he discovered that one in five patients was blind in one or both eyes, many of them children. Two decades later, thanks to that early work of Mr Koch, Mr Knipe and colleagues, there is permanent eye care capacity across all districts. Mr Koch closed on words and their power – his refusal to settle for “good” when the honest answer might be “marvellous” – and on the concept of eudaimonia, or flourishing. Being a ProVision member, he said, has been like having an older brother: one who calls out and teaches you to swim through rough water. His wish for the room was that none of them merely be good, but that they flourish and practise their own kind of magnificence.

The Third Space

Dr Fraser – a human performance researcher and consultant – returned with a presentation on strategies successful people apply to be ‘on’ everywhere and all the time. He started by talking about why some people buckle under pressure – and why champions don’t. His research has found that high performers have worked out how to manage ‘the gap’ between activities. Olympic volleyballer, Kerri Pottharst OAM, for instance, worked out that when a game that’s going well suddenly fails it’s because you “overthink your service action. You focus on what you don’t want to have happen. You worry about the results of the match”.

To avoid this, during “the gaps” between play, “she would go into a routine to keep her mind on the present moment and control emotion”, Dr Fraser said. “She looked at me and said, ‘The champions manage the gaps’.”

He said the same technique has been observed among the top 100 male tennis players: their play is effectively identical during points, and separated only by what they do between them to control their mind.

Bringing the discussion back to the workplace, Dr Fraser spoke about a CEO who realised he was taking home the rhythm of his workday and tearing through his home “like a hurricane”. It was only when he noticed his children run when they heard him open the front door that he realised he needed to make a change – to find a gap between work and home that would enable him to reset so that he could turn up with the right mindset for home.

That gap is called “the third space” – the space that lets a person transition from one context to the next. His team’s research with 800 small business owners tested a three-step routine for the third space: reflect (consider what went well during the day, what you achieved, how you improved/evolved), rest (anything that slows the brain), and reset (consider how you want to show up next).

After one month, participants reported their mood in the home improved by 43%. And it doesn’t only work when moving from work to home. One surgeon reported that he created a third space to reset between patients. Before he walks into a consult room he pauses, with his hand on the door handle, and asks himself how he would want a doctor to treat his own mother on the other side.

Chief Role Model Officer

Ms Ransom – who has interviewed global leaders including former US President Barack Obama, Virgin founder Sir Richard Branson, former US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and former Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard – returned to close the conference.

Her discussion centred on how to “lead your people to get that greater collective effectiveness”. The three characteristics she has observed among all consistently high-performing teams, irrespective of industry, are the ability to align team members on: 1. ‘the why’ and 2. ‘the how’ for proposed change and then, 3. To ‘signal’ excellent behaviour.

Ms Ransom explained people are motivated to behave as they do by six different drivers: variety and challenge, love and connection, growth and development, certainty and safety, significance of work, and contribution and impact. To get individual team members aligned on a plan for change, she urged delegates to identify their drivers and use this knowledge to shape the communication strategy.

Most importantly she said, “if you’re wondering about how to get people involved with change… ask ‘if I were to turn your no into a yes, what would I have to do?’”

To align on ‘the how’, it is necessary to create psychological safety for team members. Ms Ransom said leaders routinely rate their teams as feeling safe to contribute and challenge concepts or decisions, however team members have a different perspective. On a psychological safety scale that begins with ‘belonging’ and ‘learning’, progressing to ‘contributing’ and ‘challenging’, most team members will rate themselves as at the ‘belonging’ and ‘learning’ stages.

To align teams, leaders need to reframe their communication techniques, ensuring team members feel safe to ask questions, contribute thoughts, and gain clarity on plans for action and where they fit in.

In closing, Ms Ransom left delegates with one last task. ‘Promoting’ everyone in the room to Chief Role Model, she said high-performing teams signal best practice behaviour: they are role models for change.