Chapter 3: Reference Models for Strategic Design

Remember the whiteboard with forty-seven ideas? In her second week, Fiona asks Marcus to tell her about that meeting again. Then she goes to his whiteboard, draws nine boxes, and says: "Before we talk about what you did, let's describe the business model that broke." Those nine boxes are the Business Model Canvas. This chapter shows you how a pre-populated reference BMC gives an organisation the language to diagnose a crisis, design a response, and test whether that response is internally consistent, all before committing to a single course of action.

What You'll Be Able To Do

By the end of this chapter, you'll be able to:

Read a pre-populated Business Model Canvas and identify the structural vulnerabilities in the business model it describes.
Test whether the components of a business model hold together as an internally consistent system, before committing to a course of action.
Trace how a change in one part of the business model cascades through the rest.

Introduction: The Tool That Was Missing from the Whiteboard

Fiona Lavoie stands by the whiteboard in Marcus Chen's office, marker lowered, having drawn the empty nine boxes of a business model canvas; Marcus sits on the edge of his desk, arms folded, looking at the grid as if he already suspects what it will show Remember the whiteboard with forty-seven ideas?

When Lakeshore's leadership team gathered in crisis, they were not short of intelligence or commitment. They were short of structure. James Firth proposed cutting programs. Sandra Mwangi proposed protecting faculty. Priya Sharma proposed repositioning recruitment. Tom Beaulieu argued that his programs were healthy. Each leader had a coherent view of the crisis from their own vantage point. What they lacked was a shared picture of the whole.

In her second week, Fiona asked Marcus to tell her about that meeting again, slowly. Then she stood up, went to the whiteboard in his office, drew nine boxes, and said: "Before we talk about what you did, let's describe the business model that broke."

The nine boxes are the Business Model Canvas. Nobody had drawn them in that first meeting. Diane had watched it by video; her question, "Why does this institution exist?", came afterwards, over coffee with Marcus. And the rest of this chapter is about what a pre-populated reference BMC could have given Lakeshore that day: a language for diagnosing its crisis, designing its response, and testing whether that response was internally consistent, all before committing to a single course of action.

HERM Spotlight: Beginning with this chapter, the course works directly with artifacts from the Higher Education Reference Models (HERM v3.1.1), maintained by the CAUDIT Enterprise Architecture Community of Practice in partnership with UCISA, EUNIS, and EDUCAUSE. The HERM suite is offered under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 licensing. See the course appendix for full attribution and licensing details.

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