Leading with Strategy

24The Strategy Sketch: 6Ms of Your Strategy

A few years ago, I found myself leading a strategy session for a fast‐moving startup. The team was bright, the energy was high, and the room was buzzing with Post‐it notes stuck to a large wall‐mounted canvas: the Business Model Canvas, a tool many of us in strategy know well.

As we moved through the usual business model blocks—value proposition, channels, key activities, etc.—something felt off. The session wasn't failing. People were participating. But the conversations began to stall around the same places I'd seen in so many other workshops. The team struggled to articulate competition. The values and vision they lived by? Not represented at all. Cultural dynamics? Nowhere to be found.

I took a step back, staring at the wall, and quietly asked myself: Is this canvas enough for the complexity we're facing? It was a question I couldn't unask.

Strategy  Is Not a Plan

Over the years, I've worked with dozens of frameworks, from the Business Model Canvas to Balanced Scorecards, OKRs, Hoshin Kanri, and more. Each brought something valuable. Yet each left out essential pieces of the real‐world strategy puzzle.

That's when I was introduced to the work of Dr. Jeroen Kraaijenbrink, now a close friend and business partner in co‐creating the Big Five of Strategy. Like me, Jeroen had stood in front of incomplete canvases, sensing something crucial was missing. But he didn't stop there. He set out to build a tool that could capture the full ...