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). The Knowledge Map (Rumsfeld). Each is one page. Each is free. Each is printable. None requires a workshop, a consultant, or a six-figure budget to use.
This is a note on why we are bothering to publish them, and what holds the suite together as a practice rather than a stack of PDFs.
The frame the suite is trying to break
Most of the expensive mistakes in development work happen at the framing meeting, not at the analysis. The wrong question gets baked into the proposal. The wrong indicator gets baked into the logframe. The wrong unit of change gets baked into the budget. By the time the evaluation lands, the work is asking whether the programme reached its targets — when the question that mattered was whether the targets were ever the right ones.
The canvas suite is built for the moments before that baking happens. Each canvas slows you down at a place where speed costs the most. The questions are designed to be uncomfortable. If every box fills in easily, you are either very prepared or not being honest enough.
What the eight frameworks are doing, in order
Read left to right across a programme lifecycle, the eight do separable jobs.
Venture Readiness is for the moment before the idea has a name. Six questions to sit with 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. Twelve questions to refuse the easy indicators with.
The Evidence Canvas is for the moment before you decide what will count as proof — and for whom. Eight questions about epistemic standards before they get inherited from a previous study by accident.
The Scale Decision is for the moment before you grow. Eight questions about when growing is the right move and when it is the move that consumes the thing that made the work matter in the first place.
The Kill Criteria is for the moment before the venture has run too long to retire gracefully. Eight questions about how you will know it is time to stop.
The Causal Pathway Review (CLEAR) is for the moment when the Theory of Change is already on the wall. Five questions to stress-test the boxes-and-arrows before they get signed.
The Indicator Test (VALID) is for the moment 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 any of the above, and again after. Four quadrants to surface the tacit knowledge, suppressed findings, and blind spots that none of the other canvases catch directly.
Read together, they cover the lifecycle: design, measurement framing, evidence standards, growth, exit, pathway review, indicator review, and the knowledge map that sits over the top.
Why “free, printable, one page”
The three constraints do real work.
Free is access. The audit a practitioner cannot afford to commission becomes the audit she can run on a Friday afternoon. The free version reaches the programme officer in a small NGO who would never get the consultant brought in. That is the practitioner the work is for.
Printable is commitment. A PDF you fill in with a pen is different from a Notion page you scroll. The pen says: I am taking this seriously enough to leave a mark.
One page is honesty. If a framework needs three pages, it is hiding something. The compression forces the author to decide what actually matters.
The Innovation Advisory practice
What ties the eight together is not the format — it is the stance. The suite assumes:
- That good MEL is mostly the work of refusing the first proposed indicator and making the case for a better one.
- That the questions you do not ask in the design phase are the questions the evaluation cannot answer.
- That practitioners under deadline pressure will use the tool that costs them nothing to try, and ignore the one that costs them anything to start.
- That a framework is only useful if it earns its place inside a busy person’s week.
This is what the Innovation Advisory practice is for. It is the working name for a way of doing advisory work that ships the tools rather than gatekeeping them. The frameworks are the visible part. The slower part is the writing that explains when to reach for which, the case studies that show what they catch, and the long companion book on measurement that argues for the politics underneath the methods.
If you use any of them on a real programme and find a question missing — or one that is doing the wrong work — write in. The suite gets better every time somebody pushes back on it.