Strategy Execution Canvas by BSC Designer is a visual framework for turning strategic plans into execution-ready objectives.
Using the Strategy Execution Canvas
The Strategy Execution Canvas is licensed under CC BY-ND 4.0, which allows you to use and share the canvas in strategy workshops as long as you provide attribution and do not distribute modified versions.
Why This Canvas: Solving the Problem of Vague Strategic Plans
With our strategy execution platform, we help organizations automate their strategies. While the automation itself is fairly easy to accomplish, the typical pattern we see is that strategies and strategic plans are often not execution-ready. The most common reason is ambiguous objectives that require further analysis and decomposition before moving to execution.
To convert a strategic ambition into an execution-ready objective, we follow the process structured in the Strategy Execution Canvas:
- First, we suggest organizations reflect on the stakeholders behind their strategy. Steps 1–4 of the Strategy Execution Canvas guide this reflection by clarifying stakeholders, their aspirations, the current state, and the desired future state.
- Second, strategic objectives do not exist in isolation from the rest of the business. Their execution depends on available capabilities, constraints, and uncertainty. In Steps 5–7, we analyze the operational landscape that shapes strategy execution — capabilities and enablers, assumptions to validate, and potential risks.
- Third, the backbone of strategy execution is value-based decomposition (Step 8). Here we take into account stakeholders and the business environment and break down the strategic intent into manageable components — objectives, goals, sub-goals, and initiatives.
- Fourth, in Steps 9 and 10, we define indicators for activities and outcomes. This makes the strategy unambiguous, enables tracking of execution, helps detect unexpected issues early, and supports the learning loop.
At this point, the objective becomes execution-ready: we understand its rationale, we know how value will be created for stakeholders, and we have indicators to validate the achieved results.
We repeat these steps for the key strategic ambitions of stakeholders. In this way, the strategic plan becomes ready for execution while the organization develops stronger internal capability for strategic thinking.
Organizations that want to apply this approach in practice can use our free 1-day strategy execution workshop program, which includes a facilitation guide and templates for running a structured session using the Strategy Execution Canvas.
From Canvas to Strategy Automation in BSC Designer
The Strategy Execution Canvas helps prepare strategic plans for execution. In this section, we explain how you can map the results of your brainstorming sessions to BSC Designer software.
Stakeholder Management
Stakeholder management corresponds to the following steps of the canvas:
- Step 1. Stakeholders
- Step 2. Stakeholder Aspirations
- Step 3. Current State
- Step 4. Desired Future State
BSC Designer provides various tools to manage stakeholders:
- Manage the list of stakeholders via Settings > Strategy > Stakeholders
- Perform detailed analysis of stakeholders and their needs via a dedicated Stakeholder Scorecard
You can learn more about using this functionality in this part of the stakeholders article.
The current state and desired future state can be mapped in the stakeholder scorecard similarly to stakeholder aspirations.
Infrastructure Goals
The results of “Step 5. Capabilities & Enablers” and “Step 6. Assumptions” are typically mapped in the “Learning and Growth” perspective of the Balanced Scorecard as:
- A goal to develop required capabilities
- A goal to ensure the existence of enablers
- A goal to conduct experiments to validate assumptions (the assumption itself can be mapped as the rationale for the experiment)
Risk Management
Step 7 of the canvas is “Risks.” Depending on the risk management approach in your organization, you can:
- Map a risk under a goal by identifying it without quantification
- Map a risk under a goal and track its probability and impact over time
- Map risks in a dedicated risk register
We discuss various approaches to risk management in this article.
Value-Based Decomposition
Step 8 of the canvas is “Value-Based Decomposition,” which is the main process for turning a strategic plan into an execution-ready strategy. In BSC Designer, this is automated on the KPIs tab:
- Start by adjusting the perspectives of the template according to your needs
- Add strategic objectives to the perspectives
- Add goals and sub-goals
- Add initiatives
Quantification
Steps “9. Leading Metrics” and “10. Outcome Metrics” correspond to the quantification stage. In BSC Designer you can:
- Add metrics to objectives
- On the Context tab, select the metric type — leading or lagging
You can learn more about the difference between leading and lagging metrics in this article.
Expert Guidance
If you need expert support when facilitating a strategy workshop, the BSC Designer team can help in two ways:
- Facilitated workshop — If you prefer the BSC Designer team to facilitate the workshop, feel free to contact us.
- Train-the-trainer certification — For strategy consultants and internal strategy teams who plan to facilitate workshops regularly, we offer a train-the-trainer certification program for the Strategy Execution Canvas methodology.
What’s Next
The Strategy Execution Canvas helps prepare strategic plans for execution. To put these plans into action, organizations need a strategy architecture built on two key pillars:
- Strategy cascading to align strategy across strategic and functional scorecards
- A performance measurement framework to ensure consistent tracking of performance metrics
The BSC Designer platform provides automation support for all stages – from strategic planning to strategy execution.
BSC Designer is strategy execution software that enhances strategy formulation and execution through KPIs, strategy maps, and dashboards. Our proprietary strategy implementation system guides companies in practical application of strategic planning.