Each of these exists because the useful information is spread across people who are not usually in the same meeting.
Engineering knows how fast you find out you were wrong. Finance knows what an error costs. Operations knows where the time actually goes. No single person can complete any of these alone — and where the room disagrees is almost always the finding.
A decision recorded only as its outcome cannot be reconstructed later — the reasoning was never written anywhere. Six months on, nobody can say whether the discount was for volume, for a service failure, or because it was quarter end.
The two signal columns are the point. Supporting and contradicting evidence sit side by side, equal width. A canvas with an empty right-hand column is visibly unfinished before you have read a word of it.
Six questions, deliberately owned by different people. Should this work be automated, at what level of autonomy, and what has to be true before you start.
The verdict falls out of the pattern, and the reading guide is printed on the canvas. Nobody has to remember the rules — if two boxes come back weak, the canvas tells you whether that means instrument first, cap the autonomy, or not yet.
Firms exist because coordinating inside is cheaper than buying outside. That gap is where a services business lives — and it is closing at different speeds for different kinds of work.
Your coordination costs falling is good for you. Your client's falling is not. Five cost components, two columns, and a direction of travel. Read one way it is an early warning that a client is about to bring work in-house. Read the other way it is your own in-sourcing signal.
These are not worksheets to complete alone and circulate. The value is in the disagreement, and the disagreement only appears if the people who hold different pieces are in the room together.
Each canvas names who can answer each box. If a box has nobody in the room who can answer it, that absence is itself worth recording.
Twenty minutes, rough answers, no debate. You are looking for the boxes where people disagree, not for a finished artefact.
Three boxes will be contested. Those are the finding. The other boxes were already known and did not need a meeting.
A canvas with no owner is a workshop artefact. A canvas with a name and a date is a decision.
Attached to the workflow, the account, or the decision it relates to — not in a folder of workshop outputs nobody opens.
All three canvases are released under Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0. That is deliberate rather than generous — the people most likely to spread these are consultants, trainers and universities running paid programmes, and a non-commercial licence would block exactly the audience that matters.
Attribution: Based on The Decision Canvas by Praveen Singh V — thedecisioncanvas.com — CC BY-SA 4.0. Derivatives must carry the same licence.
The canvases are companions to The Compounding Company — a book about making AI produce measurable business change — and to the AI-Native Score, the diagnostic at its centre.