The Strategy Canvas: How to Replace Strategic Planning with Strategic Thinking
- Sean Ryan
- Mar 17, 2022
- 5 min read
Updated: Sep 14
Why Strategy Needs Rethinking
The strategy canvas is a powerful strategic planning tool that helps businesses visualize their market position and competition. In this post, we’ll explore how this tool can replace outdated planning methods with agile, big-picture strategic thinking.
You know the drill: consultants swoop in and gather random, potentially contradictory intel from key team members. They go away and conduct independent market research. From this dog’s breakfast, they piece together disparate pieces of data and perspective into thick, densely written reports full of figures and jargon.
Not only does this approach, in which strategy is done to rather than with or, even better, by your team, not engage people, but it can also create confusion, resulting in opaque direction and subpar execution.
“No wonder so few strategic plans turn into action,” Kim and Mauborgne write in a Harvard Business Review article. “Executives are paralyzed by the muddle.”
I couldn't agree more. In more than 30 years of corporate and consulting work, I’ve seen managers’ bookshelves groan under these dust-collecting bricks. And I’ve seen too many organizations miss a chance to grow and thrive because they couldn’t get clarity and alignment at the strategy creation stage.
What Is the Strategy Canvas?
The Strategy Canvas was developed by Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne, professors of strategy at INSEAD and co-directors of the Blue Ocean Strategy Institute in Fontainebleau, France.
They created it as an alternative to the typical strategic planning process.
It’s a diagnostic and action framework that helps organizations:
Visualize their current strategic position.
Compare it directly with competitors’ profiles.
Identify opportunities to diverge and focus.
Unlike a 100-page plan, the Strategy Canvas is a one-page picture that leaders and teams can actually use.
Why Traditional Strategic Planning Fails
Traditional planning is slow, costly, and disconnected from reality:
Bulky reports don’t translate into action.
Teams aren’t engaged in creating the plan.
Strategy becomes abstract — not actionable.
No surprise then that 75–90% of strategies fail at execution.
There’s specificity in simplicity: if your team can’t clearly see the strategy and how it applies to their daily work, execution will fail.
The strategy canvas does three things in one picture. It shows:
Your industry’s strategic profile–what the authors call your value curve–by mapping current and potential future competition factors.
The value curve of current and potential competitors.
Your company’s strategic profile, showing current and potential future investment in customer choice factors.
Sample Strategy Canvas template showing how organizations compare on customer choice factors such as price, quality, ease of use, and service. To get started, chart the choice factors, such as price, quality, flexibility, etc. (this will vary depending on your industry, of course) along the horizontal axis. The vertical axis is where you chart the degree of investment in each, moving from low to high. Connect the dots across all factors to reveal your and your competitors’ value curves.
Key Elements of an Effective Strategy Canvas
Kim and Mauborgne have found that all effective strategies have these three things in common:
The Four Stages of the Strategy Canvas.
Stage 1: Visual Awakening
In this step, the strategic planning participants in your company arrive at a common understanding of your current condition by:
• Comparing your business with your competitors’ by drawing “as is” strategy pictures
• Seeing where your strategy needs to, or could, change.
The draft strategy canvas shows where you overlap on the customer choice factors with your key competitors, where you may have competitive advantage, and where they may have competitive advantage currently.
Stage 2: Visual Exploration
This is the fieldwork component, where leaders get busy with outreach. Talk to your customers. Talk to your competition’s customers. Talk to users if they’re different from customers. In this stage, managers come face-to-face with their products/services to learn about:
• Adoption hurdles for noncustomers
• The competition’s distinctive advantages
• Factors you should eliminate, create, or change
“There is simply no substitute for seeing for yourself,” Kim and Mauborgne write.
This step is critical to seeing the world through the eyes of your customers, potential customers and lost customers. There is often a huge gap between how an organization sees itself during the Visual Awakening stage and how customers see it during the Visual Exploration stage.
Stage 3: Visual Strategy Fair
This is the time to revise based on your exploration, and share your results more widely by:
• Drawing new “to be” strategy canvases based on your fieldwork
• Getting feedback on alternative strategy pictures from customers, lost customers, competitors’ customers, and noncustomers
• Using this feedback to build the best “to be” strategy
Challenging your thinking–your underlying assumptions, beliefs, perceptions, etc.–about your current and potential “to be” strategies is critical here. Far too many organizations are constrained by their historical success–“this is the way we’ve always done it”–to allow themselves to see what’s possible, or where potential disruption will occur. As Matthew Olsen and Derek Van Bever wrote in Stall Points, “...it is the assumptions you believe the most deeply or that you have held as true for the longest time that are likely to prove your undoing.”
As a result, they are too late to truly change when a disruptor appears out of seemingly nowhere.
Stage 4: Visual Communication
Now it’s time to share your final strategy canvas with everyone in your organization by:
• Distributing your before-and-after strategic profiles on a single page for easy comparison
• Pursuing only the projects and actions that support the new strategy and letting the rest go
This one-page image should become the referential document for all investments and other business decisions moving forward.
Strategy requires making choices about both what you will, and won’t, do. If an idea doesn’t support the strategy, it doesn’t happen. Ideally, your strategy canvas is being referenced across your organization to ensure actions across departments and units align to the same strategic goals.
As the authors indicate, strategic planning doesn’t end with the canvas. What it does do, however, is set the process off in the right direction by putting, as they write, the “strategy back into strategic planning.”
Benefits of Using the Strategy Canvas
Simple → One page beats a 100-page binder.
Visual → Everyone sees the same picture.
Action-Oriented → Makes execution clearer.
Agile → Easy to adjust as the market shifts.
Strategy Canvas vs. Strategy Map
One common question: What’s the difference between a Strategy Canvas and a Strategy Map?
Strategy Canvas → External focus: visualizes market position and value curves.
Strategy Map → Internal focus: shows cause-and-effect logic of strategic objectives.
Want to go deeper? Check out our guide on Design & Execute Your Best Strategic Thinking Session Ever
Free Strategy Canvas Template
Want to apply the Strategy Canvas with your team? Scroll up to see the visual template example included in this post.
This one-page view gives you everything you need to start:
Compare your organization against competitors.
Identify overlaps, gaps, and opportunities.
Spark alignment in your next strategy session.
People Also Ask (FAQs)
What does the Strategy Canvas help visualize?
It shows how your organization and competitors invest in customer value factors, revealing overlaps, gaps, and opportunities.
Who created the Strategy Canvas?
It was created by Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne, professors at INSEAD and authors of Blue Ocean Strategy.
What are the 9 business model canvases?
That refers to the Business Model Canvas by Osterwalder, which is a different tool.
What’s the difference between a Strategy Canvas and a Strategy Map?
Canvas = external competition. Map = internal goal alignment.
From Planning to Thinking
In a world of perpetual whitewater, strategy must constantly evolve.
The Strategy Canvas helps leaders cut through noise, align their teams, and focus on what matters. It replaces static “planning” with dynamic strategic thinking.
We’ve worked with organizations from start-ups to Fortune 50s to help them use tools like this to deliver better results.
Ready to explore? Book a Strategy Session with WWICI.
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