The Business Execution Canvas^® on one page

Why execution needs a design

Most organisations are full of good people doing their best inside a system nobody designed. Teams form around skills, functions grow around disciplines, and processes are added when something goes wrong. Each part works; the whole often does not.

The Business Execution Canvas makes explicit what is usually left implicit: who the work is for, how it is explained, how the organisation is built to do it, how it runs day to day, and how it learns.

It updates traditional management rather than replacing it. Budgets, functions, process owners and reviews all stay. The canvas shows how they fit together, so people can see the whole and improve it.

The canvas is not always the answer. Some problems need a decision, a person or a budget, not a redesign. Use it when the same problems keep coming back, because that is usually a sign of a design gap.

The canvas at a glance

The canvas has 27 components: six foundations and 21 components across five pillars. The pillars run left to right in the order work flows, from understanding customers to adapting, and what the organisation learns feeds back into understanding.

Read it from the bottom up and left to right: Structured Collaboration is the base the other foundations rest on, because every pillar depends on teams being able to rely on each other.

The six foundations

The foundations are the platform everything else stands on. When one is weak, every pillar above it works harder than it should.

Structured Collaboration comes first because the other five only work if teams can rely on each other. A mission no team can deliver alone needs agreed handoffs to become real.

Values, behaviours and principles are easily confused. A value is what we care about. A behaviour is what we can see someone do. A principle is how we choose between two good options, such as speed and thoroughness.

The five pillars

Each pillar closes one execution gap, numbered in the order the work flows. A gap upstream spreads downstream: an organisation that runs well but misunderstands its customers simply gets more efficient at the wrong things.

The five Adapt components rise in scale. Monitor and Learn turn signals into insight. Improve is a small local change, Respond a larger change across the system, and Innovate a new way of creating value.

One canvas at every level

The same 27 components apply at every level: the whole organisation, a division, a function, a process or a single team. Each canvas sits under the one above and interprets it for its own work, rather than copying it or starting from scratch.

• Organisation: sets the mission, vision, principles, values and strategy every other canvas builds on.
• Function or division: turns enterprise goals into its own priorities and agrees what it provides to others.
• Process: the process owner uses the canvas to run the work end to end across the teams it passes through.
• Team: shows how the team’s daily work contributes to the strategy and what it needs from, and gives to, its neighbours.

At Harbourline, Ruth Adebayo owns the company canvas. Managed Services has its own canvas under it, and the Project to service process, owned by Declan Moore, crosses three of its teams.

Because every level uses the same language, a weak spot found in one team can be traced up to the design decision that caused it.

Measuring it

Each of the 27 components is scored on five described levels, and each level converts to a score from 0 to 100. Level 1 is 0, level 3 is 50 and level 5 is 100.

Each level describes what the component looks like in daily work, so people score what they see rather than how they feel. Here are the five levels for Across, under Articulate:

Harbourline scores Across at 34 overall, between levels 2 and 3. Executives see something close to level 3. Team leads, who work the handoffs every day, see level 2 at best. The next step up is clear from the table: agree what each team needs from the next at the main handoffs.

• A pillar’s score is the average of its components.
• The Foundation Score is the average of the six foundations.
• The Execution Score combines the five pillars as a geometric mean, so one weak pillar pulls it down more than a simple average would.

Read the pattern before the total. A change of 10 points or more between rounds is a real change. A wide spread between management levels on the same component usually means people experience it very differently, which is a finding in itself.

Harbourline’s third round (September 2026) shows the pattern clearly. The Foundation Score rose from 52 at the baseline to 60, and the Execution Score from 48 to 55. Understand is the strongest pillar and Adapt the weakest. The single weakest component is Across, at 34, where executives score 49 and team leads 20.

The gains are real but uneven: Articulate rose most, by 10 points, and Adapt is still lowest; within it, Respond (36) and Innovate (39) are among Harbourline’s five weakest components.

Where to start

Start where the friction is felt, not at the top left of the canvas. The diagnostic points to it: components scoring below 55 where people disagree by more than 20 points are where to look first.

1. Name the problem that keeps coming back and find the component it sits in.
2. Look upstream: a delivery problem often starts in Understand, Articulate or Design.
3. Fix one thing, measure it, and write the result into the canvas.
4. Score again next round and move to the next gap.

Common pitfalls:

• Treating the canvas as a form to fill in. Each entry should record a decision someone owns.
• Scoring generously. A score nobody would defend with evidence teaches nothing.
• Trying to fix all 27 components at once. Two or three at a time is enough.
• Operationalising before designing. New tools and routines on top of an unchanged design usually make the old problem faster.

Check your understanding

Seven questions on this lesson. Choose an answer to see straight away whether it is right, and why. Your score is saved with your progress.