Fractal Learning Canvas
I created the fifth version of Effective Innovation Canvas (quite a remake) to evaluate social innovation and business ideas.
Now this version is a radical departure and revision of the concept — the original inspiration from Business Model Canvas and Lean Canvas was replaced with the powerful idea of self-similarity or fractality (describing the project in ever granular detail and length in five or more levels with increasing numbers of sections: 0,1,2,4,8).
Again the inspiration comes from books like Exponential Organizations, Ten Types of Innovations, Antifragile, Zero to One. And concepts like Effective Altruism, Model Thinking, Theory of Change, Game Theory and Theory of Constrains and Systemic/Pattern Thinking.
The idea of fractality came to my mind when I got feedforward from Jean Paul Karijo and Katarina Gallova on the previous versions of Effective Innovation Canvas and how to simplify it for a student competition at Sote Hub.
I realized that I should have reduced the nine sections of Business Model Canvas or Lean Canvas into eight, instead of adding another one to have 10 sections. This is also an advice from Taleb in his book Antifragility — try to reduce instead of adding new things. Similar advice is also in the Theory of Constrains — reduce workload to identify the bottleneck and focus on solving the bottleneck before solving anything else.
This brought me to thinking about fractality — like branching out trees — from 0 to 1, then to 2, then to 4 and 8… together the canvas has 5 levels of increasing details:
From 0 (name of the project) to 1 Meaning (based on Massive Transformational Purpose — MTP by Salim Ismail)
[here Peter Thiel’s book Zero to One comes to mind];
2 — Meaning branches out into Problem and Solution;
4 — Problem divided into Goal and Capacity, Solution divided into Execution and Visible Learning [inspired by John Hattie];
and 8 more detailed sections.
What are those 8 sections?
Goal divided into Targets and People/Audience
Capacity divided into Team and Culture
Execution divided into Innovation and Scaling, and Theory of Change
Visible Learning divided into Key Metrics and Traction
What’s next?
We want to test the Fractal Learning Canvas in competitions at out Sote Hub and schools. The great advantage is the increasing level of detail — that it is possible to write a quick business idea and work it out in increasing detail later. This can allow us to create various short and long application forms, surveys and also teach tools connected to the canvas in ever more detail. I will try to get more feedback and try to simplify further.
Also we can continue adding one or two levels — e.g. targets can be split into activities and budget. Activities into tasks and management.
We want to then explore the idea of fractal learning more in depth through our Sote Talent project — learning from a few key concepts into more detailed concepts and using tools like Fractal Learning Canvas.
We are also working on bringing model thinking to secondary schools in rural areas and small towns by defining what could be the 10x Core Concepts — mental models that are easy to grasp and useful for understanding other concepts quicker.
