Crisis Model Canvas
đź“Ś Project Overview
The Crisis Model Canvas (CMC) is a future-facing business design toolkit that reimagines the traditional Business Model Canvas (BMC) for use in crisis scenarios. It integrates strategic foresight and human-centered design to support adaptive, inclusive, and resilient innovation. This research was conducted independently and submitted as part of an academic study. The full report is available through OCAD University’s Online Research Repository.
Project Type: Academic Research
Timeline: January 1 – April 14, 2021
Researcher: Shahria Khan
🎯 Challenge Framing
The BMC is lauded for its clarity, accessibility, and intuitive visual language—qualities that contribute to its broad appeal across disciplines and cultures. While conceptualizing an alternative tool, I was acutely aware that any redesign must preserve this simplicity while simultaneously enhancing relevance in times of crisis. The core challenge was to leverage the strengths of a well-established framework without overcomplicating the user experience. Rather than “reinventing the wheel,” the objective was to evolve the tool to accommodate dynamic, crisis-oriented decision-making without sacrificing usability. Simplicity must not come at the expense of depth—nor should complexity compromise clarity.
âś… Outcome
This research led to the development of the Crisis Model Canvas (CMC)—a foresight-informed evolution of the BMC that incorporates dynamic, human-centered, and systems-aware components. Drawing from frameworks such as the Futures Triangle, Causal Layered Analysis, and IDEO’s Three Lenses of Innovation, the CMC enables users to assess not only business viability but also social, ecological, and psychological resilience. The resulting toolkit is modular, participatory, and designed to support rapid, scenario-based planning under conditions of extreme uncertainty.
đź“š Background
Originally introduced by Alex Osterwalder in 2005 as a business design framework, the Business Model Canvas (BMC) has since evolved into one of the most widely adopted tools among entrepreneurs worldwide. When I was first introduced to the BMC, the world was in the midst of an unprecedented global crisis—COVID-19. This prompted a curiosity: could the BMC, in its existing form, effectively support entrepreneurs in navigating business models disrupted by such a systemic shock? Driven by this question, I pursued an independent research project to explore the adaptability of BMC during crises.
🔍 Key Limitations of BMC
Static Structure: Lacks built-in mechanisms for evolution or iteration.
Blind Spots: Fails to reveal unseen or adjacent innovation spaces.
Context Inflexibility: Not easily adaptable across scenarios.
Success Bias: Centers on ideal conditions rather than resilience planning.
Profit-Centric Design: Ignores broader stakeholder and systems-level considerations.
🧪 Methodology
The research applied a mixed-methods approach, combining an observational study, desk research, and speculative prototyping. The canvas evolved through hand-drawn iterations, whiteboard mapping, and the eventual translation into a digital prototype. Visual metaphors and gameplay mechanics (e.g., Ludo, Snake & Ladders) were employed to make complex foresight tools more accessible and engaging.
⚙️ Process
The development process began with whiteboard wireframing to reorganize the original nine blocks of the Business Model Canvas into a more logical, strategic structure (Fig. 01). These elements were grouped into four sequential zones—Customer, Organization, Partner, and Extended Ecosystem—designed to reflect real-world interdependencies. To introduce dynamism, decision-making checkpoints were embedded at the bottom of each column.
🧪 Prototype Design: Drawing inspiration from strategic foresight tools like the Futures Triangle (Fig. 02), I conceptualized a flexible, integrated toolkit that bridges business design with scenario planning. This evolved into what I now call the Crisis Model Canvas (CMC) Toolkit—a multidimensional tool that adapts traditional business modeling for use in uncertain, rapidly shifting contexts.
🎯 Strategic Orientation Canvas (SOC)
🔹 Motivation: The first component of the CMC toolkit draws inspiration from Ludo, a widely played South Asian board game. This metaphor emphasizes collaboration and convergence, with users’ inputting insights into four corners and collectively shaping an innovation space at the center.
🔹 Structure: The Ludo-inspired layout (Fig. 03) integrates the SWOT framework, enabling users to prioritize key signals. Strongest insights are placed in the first column, followed by moderately strong and weaker signals in subsequent columns—creating a tiered logic for strategic evaluation.
🔹 Add-ons: Each corner includes six supplementary input zones—three per side—to capture overlooked opportunities and entrenched orthodoxies, ensuring a more holistic scan of blind spots and biases in decision-making.
🧠CMC Canvas: Structure
The Crisis Model Canvas is structured around IDEO’s Three Lenses of Innovation:
Desirability: Built around an Empathy Map connected to a well-defined problem statement.
Feasibility: Maps the capabilities of both the organization and its ecosystem partners using concentric loops.
Viability: Goes beyond economics, incorporating environmental, social, and emotional impact metrics.
Directional flow, color coding, and iconography were used to help users prioritize decisions based on urgency, risk, or interdependency.
🔹 Desirability
This dimension assesses how a solution can be built—not just from internal capacity but by evaluating key partners’ strengths and weaknesses. Represented by two concentric loops, it shifts focus from self-reliance to ecosystem resilience, especially crucial in crisis scenarios.
🔹 Feasibility
This dimension assesses how a solution can be built—not just from internal capacity but by evaluating key partners’ strengths and weaknesses. Represented by two concentric loops, it shifts focus from self-reliance to ecosystem resilience, especially crucial in crisis scenarios.
🔹 Viability
The outermost loop expands beyond financial logic. While retaining Cost and Benefit boxes from the original BMC, it adds Environmental, Social, and Psychological Impact indicators—allowing the model to apply to both capitalist and post-capitalist economies.
🎲 The Future Landscaping Canvas
Inspired by the board game Snake & Ladder, this lightweight foresight tool supports rapid planning over a 100-day horizon. “Ladders” represent enablers; “Snakes” represent risks. The tool helps visualize how decisions taken under pressure might lead to either breakthrough or breakdown, depending on foresight, timing, and stakeholder inclusion.
🎲 Rationale
The purpose of this exercise is not to have an in-depth study of the future. It is the opposite of that. The aim is to outline the foreseeable future based on available signals roughly. This paper predominantly assumes that users of CMC will constantly be under constraints of time and resource limitation.
🚧 Limitations
Conducted entirely using online resources due to pandemic constraints.
Conceptual framework; has not been empirically tested or user-validated.
Complexity may deter users unfamiliar with foresight or systems thinking.
Needs iteration and real-world pilots for refinement and scaling.
đź”® Future Scopes
Potential for integration with AI and participatory platforms for scenario simulation.
Future research can assess demographic/contextual adaptability.
With iterative development, the CMC can serve startups, policymakers, and NGOs operating in uncertain environments.