The Canvas now holds eight frameworks: the Venture Readiness Canvas, the Measurement Checklist, the Evidence Canvas, the Scale Decision, the Kill Criteria, the Causal Pathway Review (CLEAR), the Indicator Test (VALID) and the Knowledge Map (Rumsfeld). Each is one page, free and printable. None of them needs a workshop, a consultant or a six-figure budget.
This note explains why we publish them and how the eight fit together into one way of working.
The mistake the suite is meant to catch
Most of the expensive mistakes in development work happen at the meeting where the work is framed, long before the analysis. The wrong question goes into the proposal, the wrong indicator into the logframe and the wrong unit of change into the budget. By the time the evaluation arrives, it asks whether the programme reached its targets, when the question that mattered was whether those targets were right in the first place.
The canvas suite is built for the moments before those choices are fixed. Each canvas slows you down at the point where speed costs the most. The questions are meant to be uncomfortable. If every box is easy to fill in, either you are very well prepared or you are not being honest enough with yourself.
What the eight frameworks do, in order
Read in the order of a programme’s life, the eight frameworks do separate jobs.
Venture Readiness is for the moment before an idea has a name. It sets out six questions to think through before you write the deck or commission the brief.
The Measurement Checklist is for the moment before you commission, design or fund a piece of MEL work. Its twelve questions help you turn down the easy indicators.
The Evidence Canvas is for the moment before you decide what will count as proof, and for whom. Its eight questions make you set standards of evidence deliberately, before they are inherited by accident from a previous study.
The Scale Decision is for the moment before you grow. Its eight questions ask when growth is the right move and when it would use up the thing that made the work matter in the first place.
The Kill Criteria are for the period before a venture has run too long to be wound down well. Its eight questions ask how you will know it is time to stop.
The Causal Pathway Review (CLEAR) is for the point when the Theory of Change is already on the wall. Its five questions test the boxes and arrows before anyone signs them off.
The Indicator Test (VALID) comes after CLEAR. Once the pathway holds, you run VALID on every indicator proposed for any of its boxes.
The Knowledge Map (Rumsfeld 2×2) is for the moment before all of the above, and again afterwards. Its four quadrants bring out tacit knowledge, suppressed findings and blind spots that none of the other canvases catch directly.
Together they cover a programme from start to finish: design, framing the measurement, standards of evidence, growth, exit, review of the pathway, review of the indicators, and the knowledge map that sits over all of it.
Why free, printable and one page
Each of the three constraints has a purpose.
Free means access. An audit a practitioner cannot afford to commission becomes one she can run on a Friday afternoon. A free version reaches the programme officer in a small NGO who would never be able to bring in a consultant, and she is the person the work is for.
Printable means commitment. Filling in a PDF with a pen is a different act from scrolling a Notion page. Writing on the page shows that you are taking it seriously enough to leave a mark.
One page means honesty. A framework that needs three pages is hiding something. The limit forces the author to decide what matters.
The Innovation Advisory practice
The eight canvases share a format, and what holds them together is a set of assumptions:
- Good MEL is mostly the work of turning down the first proposed indicator and making the case for a better one.
- The questions you do not ask during design are the questions the evaluation cannot answer.
- Practitioners under deadline pressure will use a tool that costs them nothing to try and will ignore one that costs them anything to start.
- A framework is useful only if it earns its place in a busy person’s week.
The Innovation Advisory practice exists to work on these assumptions. It is the working name for a way of doing advisory work that gives the tools away and keeps no one out. The frameworks are the visible part. The slower part is the writing that explains when to use which, the case studies that show what they catch, and the long companion book on measurement that makes the case for the politics beneath the methods.
If you use any of them on a real programme and find a question missing, or one that is doing the wrong job, write to us. The suite improves every time somebody pushes back on it.