The method
How the tools connect.
Each tool makes visible something that usually lives in people’s heads: how the business executes, how strategy reaches a named person, how teams depend on each other, what the Forum decided, and how each team improves day by day. They work from one shared picture of your organisation, so what you build in one carries into the others.
One chain, not five documents
A value stream is a chain of linked canvases.
The canvases aren’t separate paperwork. The Business Execution Canvas® sets the architecture. Each handoff along a process or value stream, such as lead-to-cash, gets its own Structured Collaboration Canvas™, linked to the next. Strategy flows down through the Strategy Deployment Canvas into team OKRs on each Structured Collaboration Canvas™. Issues a team can’t resolve flow up to the Forum, and its decisions come back to the team.
Across the business · The Business Execution Canvas®
One picture of how the business turns strategy into execution.
Most organisations aren’t designed as a whole. They grow a team, a function and a process at a time, and the logic that should connect them stays implicit. The Business Execution Canvas® makes it explicit: how purpose becomes work, how decisions are made, how value flows and how the organisation learns.
It works the same way at every level. An enterprise, a function, a process and a single team can each have a canvas, built on the same logic, so decisions made in one place reinforce the others instead of contradicting them.
How it’s built
Six foundations: Mission / Purpose, Vision, Principles, and Values and Behaviours, with Strategy Deployment across the top and Structured Collaboration as the base.
Five pillars that run as a continuous cycle:
- Understand: what customers must have, what they must not get, what would delight them and what they will need next.
- Articulate: how the organisation works, explained internally, across teams and externally.
- Design: the social, technical and economic systems.
- Operationalise: control, effectiveness, efficiency, agility, automation and AI, and digitalisation.
- Adapt: monitor, learn, improve, respond and innovate.
↻ Adapt feeds back into Understand: one continuous cycle
- Must Haves
- Must Not Haves
- Delight
- Anticipate
- Internally
- Across
- Externally
- Social System
- Technical System
- Economic System
- Control
- Effectiveness
- Efficiency
- Agility
- Digitalisation
- Automation & AI
- Monitor
- Learn
- Improve
- Respond
- Innovate
The BEC Score
Each pillar closes an execution gap, from understanding customers to adapting as things change. The free Business Execution Canvas Diagnostic scores the canvas’s 27 dimensions from 0 to 100 to show where execution is strong, fragile or missing, and where the leadership team sees things differently. The pattern matters more than the total: an organisation that scores well on operations but poorly on understanding is simply getting more efficient at the wrong things. The guides explain how to run the score in practice.
The Business Execution Canvas Builder turns the score into a design. For each of the 27 components it records what the organisation has decided, who owns it, how far it is in use and what will close the gap, at the level of the whole organisation, a function, a process or a team. It reads the diagnostic’s results, so the canvas opens with the gaps already visible.
Where it came from
The canvas began as the Business Execution Canvas, in Alex’s doctoral research at the University of Limerick, a professional doctorate in engineering that COVID interrupted before it was completed. Reviewing the research on business models, he found an execution gap: the models describe what a business intends to do, but say almost nothing about how it will actually deliver. The Business Model Canvas had made strategy visible; nothing did the same for execution.
The original five pillars, Understand, Articulate, Design, Operationalise and Monitor, are still recognisable in today’s canvas. Years of use inside real organisations turned them into a continuous cycle and added the platform they rest on.
Direction · The Strategy Deployment Canvas
Carry strategy down to a named person and a date.
One page that runs from mission and vision through objectives and strategies to dated projects with a named leader, set out by strategic pillar. It’s built through dialogue across levels, not handed down, so the commitments are realistic and owned, and it keeps running through the year with a plan, a risk register and a monthly review.
Between teams · The Structured Collaboration Canvas™
Agree how teams connect, then keep it current.
If the Business Execution Canvas® is the architecture of execution, the Structured Collaboration Canvas™ is its conversation. It captures the working logic of one relationship: what flows in, what flows out, to what standard, and what happens when something goes wrong.
It isn’t a one-off workshop output. Each team keeps its own canvas, with its values, the strategic objectives it contributes to and its team OKRs, and comes back to it when priorities, people or systems change. Its parking lot captures the issues and ideas that come up along the way.
Five questions
- Who depends on us?
- What do they need from us, and to what standard?
- What do we do to provide it?
- What do we need in order to do that well?
- Who do we depend on for it?
The blank canvas, for an individual or a team. On a small screen, scroll sideways to see all of it.
The online tool
The tool keeps a canvas for every team and reads the canvas workbooks teams already use. Because each team names the teams it depends on and serves, it checks every handoff from both sides: what one team says it needs against what the other says it delivers, and where a shared definition is still missing.
The detail that matters
Operational definitions.
Words like “complete”, “approved” and “on time” feel clear until two teams discover they meant different things.
That’s why every input and deliverable on a Structured Collaboration Canvas™ needs an operational definition: a plain statement of what counts, and how you’d check. A good one passes a simple test. Could two reasonable people apply it independently and reach the same conclusion?
Decisions back up · The Forum Decision Canvas
Close the loop on every decision.
Issues a team can’t resolve on its own come to the Enterprise Execution Forum, and the decision goes back to the team. The Enterprise Execution Forum’s decision log: what was decided, who owns it and when they report back. It builds the agenda for the next meeting from the log, so decisions are acted on rather than argued over again.
Improvement every day · Kata Storyboard
Practise improvement one experiment at a time.
A storyboard for each learner and a short daily coaching cycle, following the Improvement Kata and Coaching Kata described by Mike Rother. The learner works towards the next target condition one obstacle and one experiment at a time, and the coach asks the same questions each day until the pattern becomes habit. The challenge can come from a strategy or a Forum decision, the current condition from CollabForce365 or a value stream map, and obstacles a team can’t move go to the Forum.
Kata Storyboard is not affiliated with or endorsed by Mike Rother.
Problems solved properly · A3 Problem Solving
One problem, one sheet.
The A3 tells the story of a problem on a single page: why it matters, how the work runs today, what good looks like, what is really causing it, what was tried, what happened and what changes as a result. The owner writes it and a mentor reviews it section by section. The problem can come from the matrix, a team canvas or the Forum, and the baseline from CollabForce365 or a value stream map. It prints on one A3 sheet.
“Execution is not magic; it is design.”
Every tool on this page does the same job. It turns an unspoken assumption into an agreement people can see, test and improve.
The guides
Free guides to every canvas.
Practical guides to the Business Execution Canvas® at each level, the Structured Collaboration Canvas™, strategy deployment, and the Manifesto for Organisations with a Modern Workforce. Free when you register with your email.
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