Moving beyond the canvas model
Business canvases and thought organizers abound. From balanced scorecards to sailboat retrospectives, they provide valuable frameworks for thinking through a strategy or challenge. But then what?
As helpful as these models may be for building shared context, their value is limited if the content never moves beyond the canvas. Take a SWOT analysis as an example. I’ve seen brilliant people engage in thoughtful discussions to define their organization’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats in brutal, honest detail, only to let their collective insight languish. Why spend the time defining these details if you’re not planning to do anything with them?
And SWOT is such an easy tool to extend. If you know your strengths, why not dig in to ways you could maximize them or explore applying them to an adjacent space? Similarly with weaknesses, a list is helpful, but more helpful would be an assessment of which items on the list are most debilitating or pose the biggest risks to the organization? And external opportunities and threats are both worth evaluating in terms of what’s most worth pursuing or avoiding.
The problem with canvases (paper or digital) is that when you put sticky notes in boxes it’s too easy for them to get stuck. Sure, you can drag and drop, or copy and paste, or give everyone dots to vote with that you then need to manually count and consolidate. But it’s clunky and slow. The canvas, which works so well as an initial organizer, constrains our ability to think outside the lines.
Providing structure for divergent thinking can be immensely helpful - sometimes creativity can flourish within constraints or can flounder without limits. What if we could move seamlessly from divergent thinking to convergent thinking? For example, what if we could take each of the threats we had just identified in the SWOT, push them one at a time to people’s mobile phones, and have participants individually rate each one on two vectors, such as likelihood and impact? What if we could consolidate and sort the results in real-time to identify the biggest threats? What if we could take the top rated items into a deeper exploration of how to know when a threat has been triggered and how to mitigate it? It would add serious depth and dimension to a static canvas. It would make an organizer actionable.
If this approach sounds compelling, check out this week’s design challenge video on moving beyond the canvas to see it in action.
