The Invisible Business Model Canvas
The instrument the method runs on. Ten fields, nine verdicts, one page, with a short guide.
Every plan carries a second business model beneath the one on the slide. The official version names the revenue, the cost, the market opportunity. The invisible one names the behaviours the whole thing depends on: customers switching, staff adopting, users returning, teams following the new way when pressure rises.
Most plans never write the invisible model down. The behaviours are assumed, quietly, as facts. And when they do not happen, the gap between assumption and reality arrives under other names: wasted budget, a stalled rollout, a campaign that moved nothing.
What the canvas does
The Invisible Business Model Canvas gives teams a single page to name the behaviours their plan depends on, and then honestly assess whether each one is likely. Ten fields. Nine verdicts. One page.
The ten fields walk through the behavioural logic of the plan: from who needs to act, to what they must do, to what conditions currently stand in the way, to what the plan actually provides to shift them. Filling them in takes an hour alone, or ninety minutes with a small team.
The nine verdicts are the honest read at the end: which behaviours are well-supported, which are under-supported, and which are quiet bets the plan has not acknowledged yet.
A plan that cannot name the behaviour it depends on has not finished thinking.
How to use it
Alone, it is a thinking tool: a way to audit your own assumptions before committing the budget. With a team, it is a structured conversation that surfaces disagreements before they become expensive.
Bring the owner of the idea, someone who owns the business case, someone close to delivery, and someone close to the people being asked to change. Ninety minutes. A printout of the canvas and honest disagreement about the fields.
The guide includes the full worked example and the running order for the team session. Free, and openly shareable.
Get the full guide
The complete guide, with worked examples, the running order for a team session, and all the detail the excerpt leaves out, is available as a free PDF.
Free. No spam. One email with your download link.