Reimagining Mission Delivery with Purpose
A modified Mission Model Canvas helped government leaders clarify strategy and enable coordinated action.
Background
Amid shifting priorities and increasing delivery demands, a defense-focused federal organization used a simple but powerful framework to rethink how its structure, strategy, and operations align to deliver meaningful mission outcomes—without requiring a reorg or major overhaul.
The Challenge
Legacy structures, overlapping responsibilities, and limited shared visibility made it difficult for teams to move in unison—even when aligned in intent. Programs operated in parallel, but not in sync, creating friction that slowed delivery and made it harder to deliver integrated capabilities to mission beneficiaries.
The Solution
By adapting a commercial Business Model Canvas into a Mission Model Canvas for federal users, the team visualized both the current and ideal state of mission delivery. This enabled clear roles, reduced duplication, and aligned diverse stakeholders around shared outcomes—all within a format that resonated across technical and executive audiences.
The Approach
We began with interviews across engineering teams, program offices, and integration leads to understand structural pain points and where coordination was breaking down. A clear pattern emerged: while the mission itself was not in question, the mechanisms for delivering it lacked shared definition. To support alignment, Evans introduced a modified Mission Model Canvas (MMC).
The MMC is an organizational map for mission-driven environments. Each block of the original Business Model Canvas (BMC) was adapted to reflect the realities of public service delivery. Here is how we reimagined the original BMC for practical use of federal organizations:
Customers → Key Stakeholders
- Why: In a federal defense context, the organization does not serve traditional paying customers. Instead, it serves a constellation of internal and external stakeholders, including operational commands, oversight bodies, and program offices.
- How: We reframed this block to identify the diverse entities with influence over and interest in the mission’s success.
Value Propositions → Mission Goals
- Why: Defense organizations are not profit-driven; their “value” is measured by mission impact.
- How: We reframed the core value proposition as “Mission Goals”—what the organization exists to achieve in service of the national defense mission.
Channels → Delivery Channels
- Why: Channels in a defense setting reflect formal delivery pathways—how capability reaches end users (e.g., fielding, acquisition pathways, sustainment systems).
- How: We retained the concept but clarified it in terms of how mission capabilities are operationalized.
Customer Segments → End Users
- Why: While stakeholders influence the system, “End Users” are those at the tactical edge—operators, sailors, maintainers—who use and rely on the capabilities.
- How: We clarified this distinction to better center the needs of the warfighter.
Key Activities → Activities and Milestone
- Why: Programmatic work in federal settings tends to be milestone- and schedule-driven, not product lifecycle-centric.
- How: We expanded the block to capture both enduring activities and key decision or delivery milestones.
Key Resources → Resources
- Why: Resources in a federal setting include billets, contracts, industrial base partners, and access to test ranges—not just physical capital.
- How: We retained the block but broadened its interpretation beyond commercial assets.
Key Partnerships → Delivery Partners
- Why: Partnerships in defense include other program offices, primes, labs, and cross-service collaborations.
- How: We reframed this block to emphasize the organizations and actors critical to capability delivery.
Revenue Streams → Costs and Risks
- Why: Federal programs don’t generate revenue, but they do manage constrained budgets and significant delivery risks.
- How: We replaced this with “Costs and Risks” to surface both resource constraints and operational vulnerabilities.
Cost Structure → Impact Measures
- Why: Cost is a factor, but impact is the more meaningful metric in mission-driven organizations.
- How: We reoriented this block to define how success is measured—i.e., how well capabilities are fielded, sustained, and improving mission outcomes.
(Addition) Key Capabilities
- Why: To achieve a mission, an organization must deliver more than outputs—it must cultivate and coordinate strategic capabilities (e.g., integration, rapid fielding, stakeholder engagement).
- How: We introduced this new block to help differentiate between what the organization does (activities) and what it must be good at to succeed (capabilities).
We facilitated a session to map both current state and future vision. This gave teams a structured way to talk about misalignments, uncover capability gaps, and coalesce around what must change.
The Impact
The adapted canvas became a shared frame of reference that improved strategy conversations, clarified dependencies, and helped leaders bridge the gap between innovation and execution. It is now a living tool supporting planning, governance, and cross-functional collaboration—without adding bureaucracy.
