Design Thinking plus Adaptive Leadership:

Leading Organizational Change with the Change Canvas

Adriano Pianesi
Johns Hopkins Carey Business School, USA

Adriano Pianesi is an expert in

leadership and co-design, topics that
lie within the blurred boundaries of
innovation, learning, power and Abstract
collaboration. He has worked in change initiatives in
world-class organizations like Philip Morris, Microsoft, the This paper describes the Change Canvas, a visual
International Monetary Fund, Johns Hopkins University, framework for strategic conversations about change
the US Marine Corps, the US State Department, and NASA.
with large groups. The Change Canvas transfers
He is the founder of ParticipAction Consulting, Inc., a
consulting practice in Alexandria, VA, and he is a faculty to the complexity of organizational change the
member at the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School and simplicity of Osterwalder’s Business Model
the US State Department Foreign Service Institute. In his Canvas, step-by-step process from the lean start-ups
e-book, Teachable Moments of Leadership: Case-in-Point and “design thinking” toolkit. It then plugs in the
Resources for Daring Leadership Educators, co-authored practical wisdom and insights on adaptive change
with Jill Hufnagel in 2016, he describes a state-of-the-art
from the Adaptive Leadership model.
experiential leadership learning methodology that gets real
results, going from PowerPoint to powerful.
Keywords: Change Canvas, Business
Model Canvas, organizational change, leadership,
Adaptive Leadership, design thinking
Author’s
Contact Information:

_______________
Adriano Pianesi

Phone: 703-920-0208
202-262-3371

CEO of Participation Consulting, Inc.

306 Aspen Place
Alexandria, VA 22305
USA

Email: adriano@pianesi.com

Pianesi 45
 The Change Canvas is a one-page process
template powered by both an Adaptive Leadership
framework and design thinking. It offers a process
for thinking collectively about change for an
organization or community.
The Change Canvas—with its visual,
sequential 10-step process of critical reflection—
is a radical leap in terms of how change planning
and implementation is accomplished in today’s
organizations because of its principles of inclusion
and its cycle of ongoing learning. When printed
on a large poster, the Change Canvas creates a
productive space of critical reflection for many
organizational actors by including them effectively
in context diagnosis and intervention design, by
building psychological ownership of the issue, and
by mobilizing all stakeholders in implementation.
Drawing on case studies, my teaching at the
Johns Hopkins University Carey Business School,
but mainly on my work as a leadership consultant,
this paper describes the Change Canvas and its use.
The Change Canvas Comes Alive
Meet Jack. Jack is a new director of a
family-run business with high margins and excellent
brands. Unfortunately, his corporate group is dealing
with increasing market pressure, and the prior
quarter’s disappointing sales report is forcing top
management to face the hard reality of new market
conditions. Jack senses, based on his experience,
that low sales are just the beginning and that the
company will rapidly decline unless it moves away
from reliance on individual contributors toward a
more collaborative and teamwork-oriented culture.
Meet Lisa. Lisa is an HR manager who is
trying to advance gender equity in the nonprofit
organization where she works. Aside from a few
speeches by the CEO, little progress has been made
in the past three years to move this cause forward.
She is aware that this task will not be accomplished
in a month. Thus, she presses on, but it is also clear
to Lisa that she needs to address the issue more
deeply to make a real difference. She is unclear,
however, which actions to take to get there.
When I am hired to help in circumstances
like these, I meet with clients to learn about the
kinds of change they want in their organizations.
I know—and they know—that once their generous
46 Organization Development Journal l Fall 2019
aspirations meet the real world, they will meet
people who mostly will not care or cannot be
bothered. They will need to engage others and
bring them into the conversation. Some people
might be on board from the beginning, but failure
is more likely if my clients lack a clear idea of the
big picture and the overall context they are trying to
influence or if they are not astute enough about the
players within this context.
I love Jack and Lisa’s passion and
determination. But unguided, they risk turning
their work for change into a faith-based journey
driven by righteousness. Many people who want to
exercise leadership and implement change start with
a strong vision and a plan for realizing it. Yet, I have
observed that, given the ambiguity and intricacy
of organizational reality and the unpredictability
of complex systems, Plan As rarely work as
envisioned by their planners. This is because, by
definition, a plan cannot manage the unexpected.
Compounding the problem, the original plans as for
change are rarely updated with the lessons learned
for the unfolding reality. Inevitably, initial visions
for change are built largely on assumptions (or
hypotheses) that might—or might not—be accurate,
assumptions that need to be tested systematically to
refine the initial vision and move toward progress.
Although a strong vision is required initially as
the cornerstone of the change effort, leadership
activities need to uphold the strong vision with
facts, observed behaviors, or actual events, not just
faith in the quality of the initial thinking.
The problem is that many people—including
Jack and Lisa—exercise leadership and manage
organizational change carrying their hypotheses
in their heads and, therefore, never clarify them
or open them up for validation. What they need
is something that facilitates frank conversation
with other people, that communicates their vision,
and builds collaborative agreements to a certain
understanding of reality. Once they embark on
this work, they need to continue their learning
attitudes and have ready access to the practical
wisdom of good change theories. Importantly,
they should stress-test their ideas about change
before implementation to minimize personal and
organizational risks, increase their chances of
success, and protect their own reputations. Jack
and Lisa are embarking on a risky business. Jack
and Lisa need the Change Canvas in their projects.
The Roots of the Change Canvas: Sensemaking,
Radical Inclusion, and Ongoing Learning
Individuals, groups, and systems are
constantly faced with the need to learn and change
if they are to adapt to changing circumstances.
In this process these actors make meaning of the
new—the unknown and the unexpected —based on
their previous knowledge. The process of treating
the unknown as knowable and of recognizing the
new or the unpredictable in their environment and
interpreting it either in reference to the known or
to build new knowledge is called sensemaking.
Inspired by the stances of radical inclusion of
large group methods and the ongoing experiential
learning of action research, the Change Canvas
facilitates sensemaking for organizational change,
learning, and innovation. By facilitating a regular
cycle of action and reflection about organizational
change with large numbers or organizational actors,
the Change Canvas simplifies the exploration of the
wider system, literally creating a visual map of it, to
act in the system and learn from it (Ancona, 2011;
Mahapatra & Pattnaik, 2013).
Organizational change is a problem in
the complex domain (Snowden, 2007), a kind of
problem where linear, top-down approaches—a
great fit for “simple” or “complicated” problems with
solutions that can be discovered, refined, evaluated,
and scaled—prove ineffective and unsustainable
over time. According to Snowden, “We manage
complex problems by probing, sensing, and
responding: creating environments and experiments
that allow for patterns to emerge, increasing the
level of interaction and communication, opening
up discussions using large group methods…”
(Snowden, 2007, p. 7). Complex problems require
less left-brain, sequential, technical rationality-
inspired learning and more right-brain, emergent,
sensemaking approaches. Accordingly they
require reframing the change makers’ job from
pre-conceiving deliberate strategies that people
will implement to managing the process of
strategic learning of many organizational actors
(Mintzberg,1998, Holman et al., 1999) or, more
simply, “organizing for learning” (Kim, 2001, p.
15) so that novel strategies can emerge. Because
organizational change is dynamic, nonlinear, and
Pianesi
counterintuitive (Balogun & Hailey, 2008, Patrizi,
Thompson, Coffman, & Beer, 2013), bringing
about change in organizations is about devising an
emergent and collective learning strategy for better
adaptation.
A wide range of change management
interventions in today’s organizations leverage
inclusion and collective learning to strengthen
change efforts. Two of those approache—large
group methods and action research—build people’s
collective sensemaking embodying the stances of
radical inclusion and ongoing learning during times
of change.
Large group methods (Benedict & Bunker,
2006) bring together “the system”—all the
concerned parties or stakeholders rather than just
a few change makers—in one place, so that more
organizational actors are involved in strategizing
and planning change. Because these approaches
tap into a systemic rather than partial perspective
about organizational change, they increase the
chances of succeeding by avoiding missing
important data and perspective. Compared to
traditional approaches to organizational change, the
involvement of many more employees in important
decisions about strategy enlists everyone in meeting
the challenge and brings together diverse interest
groups to work toward a common goal: building
a shared understanding of the issues facing them
(Weisbord,1987).
Action research (Reason & Bradbury, 2006),
“a participatory, democratic process concerned
with developing practical knowing in the pursuit
of worthwhile human purposes” (p. 156), builds an
emergent and collective learning strategy through
an iterative process of action and reflection. The
classical model of action research involves
collecting and analyzing data about the nature
of a problem, taking action to bring about some
change, and observing the effects of that action to
inform further work to improve the situation. As
experimentation involves successive cycles of
action and evaluation­­—besides data gathering and
feedback to the client group—“one of its defining
features is that system members collaborate with
each other and with an external consultant to review
the data, clarify the issue, and formulate a hypothesis
about cause and effect. This becomes the premise
for subsequent action planning and implementation
47
of the action” (Hayes, 2002, p. 335).
Two Approaches for Change
The idea of a Change Canvas originated with
Linksy and Bernstein (2016) who provided a strong
argument for merging the structured simplicity of
design thinking with the comprehensive theory for
change of Adaptive Leadership. There is tremendous
power, as Linsky and Berstein suggest, in merging
these two models in the organizational change
arena and leveraging their precision. This allows
for more productive and strategic conversations
about change, so that people in organizations start
to agree on what change is, how to understand it,
and what it assumes. Every effort should be made
to prevent any misunderstanding when words
like “change,” “communication,” “planning,”
“process,” “strategy,” or “aspiration” are used.
What if we could clarify what we mean when we
say “organizational change” through a process
template from the design thinking toolkit, based
on the Business Model Canvas and powered by the
Figure 1. Business Model Canvas. (Fritscher et al.
2009, p. 29)
48 Organization Development Journal l Fall 2019
insight about change of the Adaptive Leadership
framework?
Design thinking is a way of thinking about
problems, a creative approach to problem-solving
that strives to address user needs with a focus on
human values, rapid iterations (bias for action
and rapid prototyping), and collaboration across
boundaries. The design thinking toolbox provides
new ways to explore ideas collectively with the
purposes of innovation and entrepreneurship
nuanced by a rare balance of analytical mastery
and intuitive originality that reconciles rigorous
analysis with creative intuition (Martin, 2009).
One such tool is the Business Model
Canvas from the work of Osterwalder and Pigneur
(2010). The Business Model Canvas is used by
entrepreneurs and start-ups to create, visualize,
and test business models without wasting capital
or overcomplicating their approach. Per Fritscher
et al. (2009), “The most interesting feature is the
ability to describe the business logic of a company
on one page: none of the individual elements of the
Business Model Canvas are new to business people.
But the simple and yet holistic look at a business on
a single page is surprisingly new to most of them”
(p. 30).
The Business Model Canvas provides a
holistic picture of how a company creates and
captures value by defining the who, what, how, and
why of a business (see Fig. 1). In a business model
innovation workshop, people ask basic questions,
filling the canvas with their answers and making
connections between the different elements (see
Fig. 2).
Questions are:
• What does our current business model
offer to customers? What is our value
proposition? This helps define the offerings
(products and services) and describe how
the business model caters to the target
customers’ needs.
• Who are our target customers? Because
customers are at the heart of every business,
answering this question helps entrepreneurs
understand precisely which customer
Figure 2. Business Model Canvas with the nine
building blocks grouped into perspectives and their
relations named. (Fritscher et al., 2009, p. 32)
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segments are relevant for the business
model and which segments’ needs are not.
• How do we produce our offerings? What
activities are key for us to produce
our products/services? To put a value
proposition into effect, you must carry
through various processes and activities.
This identifies another important dimension
of business model design work and of the
company’s value chain.
• How do we generate profit? What is our cost
structure? Or more simply, why does the
business model work commercially? The
profit mechanism, with cost structures and
revenue-generating mechanisms, clarifies
the financial viability of the business model.
The completed Business Model Canvas
features the answers to each question in one or
two lines, so that everybody understand what is
important rather than getting lost in endless details.
Every box is filled in, providing an overview of
49
how to stay in business and thrive.
According to Fritscher and Pigneur (2009),
the Business Model Canvas allows its users to:
• “Mobilize people to generate new business
opportunities: in this first phase the Business
Model Canvas can help to set a simple
common language through its nine blocks,
links, and layout
• Understand the current situation: using
group techniques the canvas helps to
regroup the collected information and hints
at missing information
• Design, extending the business model with
sticky notes in one-page format: alternatives
can be identified until a best one emerges
• Implement the chosen business model: the
canvas and techniques, like story-telling,
help share the vision and therefore facilitate
implementation
• Manage the current business model: like
strategy maps, the canvas can help to
monitor the current situation” (p. 34).
The key takeaways of the Business
Model Canvas approach relevant to our work for
organizational change are four:
1. Trial and error is a critical mindset.
Smaller, faster iterations for testing a vision
allow designers to work inside the box of
possibilities, a non-intuitive space that lies
between the impossible and the probable.
In this perspective, mistakes are just another
name for getting closer to the next successful
iteration.
2. An empathic understanding of reality is a
must. Designers who immerse themselves in
the world of their customers gain important
insights about how their product or service
can help them. This connection starts with
empathy and true perspective-taking, rather
than distance and statistics.
3. Prototypes create shared understanding.
Producing an artifact, rather than simply
talking about something, makes it easier
to test assumptions collectively and chart a
shared course of action with precision and
rigor.
4. Communicating and building the “new”
are inseparable. Every interaction during
50 Organization Development Journal l Fall 2019
organizational change is both an occasion
to communicate about change and learn
about it. Brilliant design comes from great
creativity, but great creativity is rooted
in exploration and inquiry that most
immediately sets conditions for re-building
(and testing) previous learning.
Often the people in charge of developing a
business model or planning organizational change
struggle to involve large groups meaningfully and
efficiently in their work. The result is the practical
exclusion of larger elements of the organization
from the process of learning and strategizing. As
the originator of the Business Model Canvas noted,
“Without a visual map of some sort, most groups
will wander aimlessly around a closing list of issues,
without closing on any of them” (Ertel et al., 2014,
p. 108). In truth, it can be hard for a group to get
their collective head around something as complex
as a business model or diagnosing an organization
for change or planning action. The Change Canvas
(see Fig. 3) transfers to the arena of organizational
change the simplicity of Osterwalder’s Business
Model Canvas visual, step-by-step process for
start-ups. It then plugs in the practical wisdom and
insight on from the Adaptive Leadership model.
The theory of Adaptive Leadership was developed
by Heifetz, Linsky, and their colleagues at Harvard
Kennedy School. According to them, leadership is
the practice of “mobilizing people to tackle tough
issues, adapt, and thrive” (Heifetz et al, 2009, p.14).
Rather than being technical problems, many of the
challenges we face today, including organizational
change, are adaptive. Heifetz and Linsky maintain,
“The problems that require leadership are those that
the experts cannot solve. We call these adaptive
challenges. The solutions lie not in technical
answers, but rather in people themselves. Most
people would rather have the person in authority
take the work off their shoulders, protect them from
disorienting change, and meet challenges on their
behalf. But the real work of leadership usually
involves giving the work back to the people who
must adapt and mobilizing them to do so” (p.35).
According to Bernstein and Linsky (2016),
“Adaptive Leadership embodies relentless realism.
It teaches those who lead change to accept that their
work will be difficult, risky, politically contentious,
and personally gut-wrenching” (p. 4).
The Change Canvas capitalizes on the
tactical advice of Heifetz and Linsky (2002) for
change makers on how to relate to the people in
their organizations to “protect [them] from those
trying to push [them] aside before [they] complete
[their] initiative” (p. 3). The generous advice is
that change makers have a risky job, because,
they assert, “Leading major organizational change
often involves radically reconfiguring a complex
network of people, tasks, and institutions that have
achieved a kind of modus vivendi, no matter how
dysfunctional it appears to you. When the status
quo is upset, people feel a sense of profound loss
and dashed expectations. They may go through a
period of feeling incompetent or disloyal. It’s no
wonder they resist the change or try to eliminate its
visible agent” (p. 3).
Heifetz and Linsky’s (2002, 2008) work
shares several techniques for minimizing these
external threats and increasing people’s chances of
success. Adaptive Leadership is the Change Canvas’
Figure 3. Change Canvas with the ten building
blocks grouped into perspectives and their relations
named
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“operating system.” A description of the theory and
of its great power in creating a language for change’s
personal and collective dimension (with ideas like
purpose, bandwidth, pacing the work, confidante,
tuning, repertoire, hunger, factions, classic error -
Heifetz et al., 2008) is outside the scope of this paper.
However, note that six of the ten Change Canvas
boxes (risks, readiness, my purpose, next critical
goal, factions, and next action) come straight from
Adaptive Leadership concepts: The Change Canvas
makes this sophisticated way to think about change
more accessible by making Adaptive Leadership’s
powerful insights readily available to more people.
Such expanded accessibility allows change
makers to include more people in the process of
sensemaking and to increase the precision and rigor
of their contributions when dealing with diverse
elements, such as current reality, current culture,
level of readiness, factions around the issue, and
group aspirations.
Four essential takeaways for change makers
from this framework are, for our purposes:
51
 1. Exercising leadership means mobilizing
people to do adaptive work. The Lone
Ranger idea of leadership is ineffective.
Given the today’s complex world, we have
no chance of implementing adaptive change
if we do not engage in a mobilization
strategy for the larger organization.
2. Exercising leadership requires
improvisation. The work of leadership is
about the ability to pivot and change strategy,
by asking at any given time, “Where am I?”
to rethink how best to proceed. Vision and
purpose are important, but so is an organized
and disciplined process of reality-testing
along the way and the ability for strategic
and tactical course correction.
3. Successful adaptation requires
experimentation and “learning in action.”
Adaptation happens through experiments,
and some will fail. Without a tolerance
for failure, an attitude for forgiveness, a
commitment to continuous learning and
Figure 4. Lisa’s Change Canvas
52 Organization Development Journal l Fall 2019
experiment-design, change makers will not
succeed. Failure is always an option, but
learning from failure is mandatory.
4. The work of change requires thinking
politically. Change makers need a clear
understanding of the parties involved in
the issue with which they are dealing, and
they need an appropriate understanding of
the power distribution, spheres of influence,
and strongly held values in given contexts.
Why and How the Change Canvas Works
Why merge design thinking and Adaptive
Leadership? Why is filling out a Change Canvas
important to the Jack’s and Lisa’s in the real world?
Because the one-page process template will give
them an uncomplicated process to follow, one that
will allow them to involve more people in this work,
and is framed according to the insight on how to
engage with adaptive change.
The Change Canvas works because it draws
participants into collaborative sensemaking during
organizational change: Per Weick et al. (2005),
“Sensemaking involves turning circumstances into
a situation that is comprehended explicitly in words
and that serves as a springboard into action” (p. 409).
It works because, with its strong preoccupation
with failure and reluctance to simplify, it addresses
one-by-one all the issues that are often responsible
for the failure of organizational change. In its
practical application, the Change Canvas—rather
than a roadmap to get you from point A to point
B—is more like a compass, helping participants to
find their way through the fog of complex systems,
discovering a path as they go along. The Change
Canvas methodology is important because it
confronts head-on the reality that social contexts
and processes are always in flux, with emergent
issues, unforeseen risks, and surprises arising
constantly and unexpectedly. Acknowledging
complexity does not mean discarding planning
processes altogether, but rather recognizing that the
most sustainable plans are those that are rooted in
Figure 5. Jack’s Change Canvas
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trial and error coupled with immediate corrective
response.
You see one iteration of Lisa’s Change
Canvas (Fig. 4). (The canvas is available for
download in PDF format at http://bit.ly/2zmlJfG).
The Change Canvas completed in a two-day
workshop with Jack is also depicted (Fig. 5). (The
canvas is available for download in PDF format at
http://bit.ly/2y4RV5z).
The 10 Blocks of the Change Canvas
The left side of the canvas (blocks 1 to 5)
(Fig. 6) is for understanding reality, asking the key
questions, and doing the correct analysis. It allows
the change maker to:
• Understand the operational reality
• Identify context’s espoused and unstated
values
• Evaluate the context readiness for change
• Clarify their own aspiration for change, their
own strengths/weaknesses to do the work
• Diagnose risks if the decision to act is made.
53
The left side of the canvas requires the change
maker to answer key questions for understanding
their own motivations and the operating context:
What is the reality they are operating in?
What values do people believe and consider
important? What is the readiness for change
of the people around them? How capable,
able, and willing are the people around them
about this change? What is the change
maker’s purpose? If the change maker is the The right side of the canvas (blocks 6 to
right person to make this happen, what do
they bring to the task? What is the generous
aspiration the change maker wants to realize
in this change? What are the risks of this
work to the change maker, their people, the
organization or community? What are the
gaps and limiting beliefs that the change
maker needs to address?

Figure 6. Change Canvas left side

54 Organization Development Journal l Fall 2019

10) (Fig. 7) is for intervention design and drafting
a plan of action. Using the analysis of the left side,
the right side of the canvas allows the change maker
to:
• Pace aspirations in manageable steps
• Understand the factions around the issue
with their fears, wants, and values
• Clarify the change maker’s relationship
with each of those groups
• Identify possible narratives to craft that
Figure 7. Change Canvas right side
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speak to each.
On the right side, the change maker can plan
and strategize. The right side of the canvas requires
answering key questions for planning effective
interventions in the operating context:
What is the change maker’s next critical goal
in this change? What are the fears, potential
losses, and preferred outcomes of the factions
or groups of people around the issue? How
does the change maker interact with each
55
 faction? Who is the change maker to them? (1984) phases of learning. The Change Canvas lab
What is the change maker relationship with provided Jack’s and Lisa’s teams an opportunity to
each? How can the change maker help them experience all four of Kolb’s learning phases:
reach shared purpose? What inspires them? • Their Change Canvases were filled with
What narrative can be used to bring them to events and stories evoked during the lab; the
partner with the change maker in the work event itself allowed people to have concrete
of change? What will the change maker do experience of those stories and of the reality
next to make progress? What will the next of the context.
action be? • The labs were facilitated and led making
ample use of open questions and debriefing
The Change Canvas Lab moments by tapping into people’s ability
The Change Canvas is not only a tool to to reflect and make connections (reflective
move more quickly and effectively from Plan A to observation).
success, it is also a process to exercise leadership • The diagrammatic mapping and connection
in your change initiative while mobilizing people of ideas written in the Change Canvas created
in strategic conversations and collective learning. unexpected relationships between elements,
Though we romanticize the visionary genius who including brainstorming innovative ideas
sees the future and charts a perfect course, reality and articulating a “change theory” (abstract
does not play out like that. In the complex work conceptualization).
of change we need effective collective learning • While not during the Change Canvas
strategies and processes to think strategically with lab, identifying the next action in the
others. Other people—not us—help refine or refocus Change Canvas and getting involved in
how to communicate aspirations, understand the making it happen provided a field of active
current reality and the factions’ perspectives. They experimentation for the participants.
help improve strategic thinking and stress test ideas,
recalibrate messages, find better courses of action, Here is—in four steps—how to proceed to
while assessing progress along the way. Such work hold a Change Canvas lab for a change initiative:
with others is the day-to-day work of leaders. Step 1: This link: http://www.
These moment-to-moment actions designed MyChangeCanvas.com allows you to create a
to make progress on the bigger things people care unique, personalized Change Canvas. The process
about —but where, like organizational change, forces brevity, careful choice of words, and
no ready-made solutions are available—are the distillation of the essence of ideas for change. This
building blocks of adaptive change (Heifetz & has important implications: when plans for change
Linsky, 2002). Exercising leadership to deal hit the road, one often might have only one minute
successfully with adaptive change is about acting to grab the attention of an uninterested audience,
with a nuanced understanding of the surrounding to convince an important person in a hypothetical
reality using diagnostic skills. It is about going on elevator pitch, or to have a potential supporter keep
“the balcony,” a metaphor for distancing oneself reading a blog page. One of the canvas’ result is
from the fray to gain both a clearer view of reality a single-page vision that is easily sharable, which
and some perspective on the bigger picture. It is means that it will be read by more people and used
about creating moments of impact (Ertel & Solomon, in the work for change.
2014) for the largest number, to hold the attention Step 2: With the 10 elements clearly
of those who most need to be involved in the work mapped out, the Change Canvas can be shared to
of change. The Change Canvas institutionalizes test understandings with others and invite them into
and graphically represents the “balcony view” with the analysis, action or both. This is the occasion
a map of reality to ground action planning. of a first Change Canvas lab, where the canvas is
A Change Canvas lab operationalizes a sort printed on a giant poster and people are invited to
of collective, structured experiential learning around comment. This is not about boasting the personal
this “balcony view” utilizing all four of Kolb’s brilliance of the change maker’s analysis, but—

56 Organization Development Journal l Fall 2019

like all prototypes—about testing it with others,
engaging people in the process of meaning-making
about reality, and building and validating iterations
of the plan that will get executed.
Step 3: Its simplicity means that each of the
canvas 10 boxes will be updated more easily to help
refine the thinking and clarify hypothesis. After
many iterations, the change maker gets to a point
where it is clear that the plan could really work:
at this point execution happens. That is when the
change maker starts spending their personal capital
to exercise leadership and move into action.
Step 4: After the action, the change maker
can regroup and give another look at the Change
Canvas: Have we missed the mark? Have we
managed to accomplish the critical goal? What
have we learned in the process? This is when
another Change Canvas lab is held.
Conclusions
hypothesis at the center of change.
The Change Model canvas offers a new
way to work together to change the future; but a
word of caution is also important. The inclusion
and learning of the Change Canvas might not be
enough to ensure success in a change initiative. It
would be naïve to believe a new tool or approach
can have a transformative power per se. This new
way is simple, but it is not easy, straightforward,
or guaranteed. It requires not only learning how
to fill out a set of boxes with a group but also,
perhaps more important, making a profound and
subtle shift in how we approach one another and
the situations of which we are part. Above all, it
requires practicing learning by doing.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

For Jack and Lisa, the Change Canvas

meant a new way to think together about change.
Both had been working in bold, generous projects
for change before. They had both put their effort
into ideas to make their organizations better. What
was different this time was that they were able to
engage others to really contribute to their vision.
With the Change Canvas, they were able to spend
more time testing ideas in the real world rather than
developing and debating them. The Change Canvas
increased their active engagement in finding holes
in their thinking in a way that did not waste time and
energy. They were able to recognize early if their
ideas could work. Jack and Lisa were able to build
a shared language and collective understanding of
the situations, so that everyone in their teams got
the “big picture” of how all the pieces fit together.
Using the Change Canvas in Jack and Lisa’s
projects produced six principle benefits:
1. It simplified complexity.
2. It forced them to adopt a diagnostic and
experimental mindset.
3. It demanded a deep knowledge of the
context in which they were operating.
4. It required that they pace the work ahead.
5. It highlighted the political dimension of
change.
6. It put learning “in action” and testing the

Pianesi 57
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