Module 1: The model

Version: 1.0 · 2026-09-19 What this answers: what a floor, a department, a seat, a port and a unit are, how the twelve departments join end to end, and what earns a seat a place on the canvas. Who this is for: a candidate for Certified Implementer, working alone. It assumes you have run or advised a small business and that you have never seen this product. Where it sits: module 1 of the Implementer curriculum, and the only one the others all rest on. Module 2 opens the seat up, module 3 opens the recipe, and module 6 goes back to ports and wiring in detail. You are not expected to be able to wire a canvas at the end of this. You are expected to be able to read one. Estimated time: 3 hours. About 75 minutes reading, 60 minutes on the four exercises, 15 minutes on the knowledge check, and 30 minutes on the practical task. Facilitated live it is 90 minutes, which is a different shape and is set out at the end.

1. What you will be able to do at the end

Six things, and each one is checkable rather than felt.

The sixth is the one the exam actually marks, and the one every later module builds on. The rubric fails a submission that states something the brief did not say as though the brief said it, and the habit that avoids that failure is learned here, in the smallest possible setting: reading a canvas without inventing anything that is not on it.

2. The one idea underneath all of it

A business is not a chart of who reports to whom. It is a set of places where work is measured, joined together so that what comes out of one is what goes into the next.

The model says so in three levels, and the wording is worth learning exactly because everything else in the curriculum reuses it.

A floor is how the business is grouped and who runs it. A department is what carries a ratio, an input, an output and a number between them, which is what earns it a seat on the canvas. A function is one concrete way a department does its job.

Read that middle sentence twice. A department earns its place by carrying a ratio, not by being important and not by having somebody's name on it. If you cannot say what goes in, what comes out and roughly what the number between them is, you have not found a department, you have found a topic.

3. Four floors

There are four, they are in this order, and the order is not decorative: it runs from the floor that decides, through the floor that sells, through the floor that delivers, to the floor that holds the whole thing up.

The chain runs through departments, not floors. A floor is a grouping, and it is the thing you point at when you are explaining the business to its owner. Nothing is measured at floor level.

4. Twelve departments, and two rules that never bend

Twelve, always, on every canvas. Two rules go with them and they are the two most useful sentences in this module when you are sitting in front of an owner.

Rule one. Every business has all twelve. A department nobody staffs is not absent. It is an empty seat, and an empty seat is a finding. This is the entire reason the canvas draws departments the owner has not thought about. When a plumbing firm's canvas shows Human Resources with nobody in it, the canvas is not wrong and it is not being pedantic: it is saying that hiring is happening in somebody's head, on a Sunday, with no method and no record, which is exactly the thing that will break when the fourth van arrives.

Rule two. Specialization is override, never rewrite. A business type may change labels, unit names, who usually holds a seat, the order of the chain, and which recipes arrive switched on. It may not invent a thirteenth department, and it may not delete one it finds inconvenient. So a trades business calls Production Dispatch and on site and Delivery Invoice and aftercare, and both are still Production and Delivery underneath.

4.1 The seven that join end to end

Seven of the twelve are joined, and each one's output is the next one's input, word for word.

The final unit is a kept customer. Not a sale, not a delivery. A customer who is still there. That choice is the whole argument of the model in one word, and it is the first thing worth saying to an owner who thinks the run ends at the invoice.

4.2 The five beside it

4.3 Three things that look like departments and are not

Sourcing, market and position, and the core team. Each of them is real work, each of them carries methods, and none of them holds a seat. Sourcing folds into Production, market and position fold into Offering Design and Vision and Strategy, and the core team folds into Human Resources.

If you catch yourself about to draw one, the question to ask is rule one's question: what goes in, what comes out, and what is the number between them? For sourcing the answer is Production's own answer, which is how you know it is not a thirteenth department.

5. What you actually see: the Example business

Everything from here on is shown on the business type the product ships as its example, Trades and home services: plumbing, electrical, HVAC, landscaping, roofing, cleaning. It was chosen because work arrives the same way in all of them, a call or a form, a quote, a scheduled job, an invoice, a chase, and because it is the type the catalog covers most completely.

Nothing in this section is a mock-up. Every frame is the product as it stands.

5.1 The canvas starts with one question

One question, twelve answers, and the sentence under the heading is the one to read aloud to an owner: "Pick the nearest. Your whole canvas is drawn from it in a couple of seconds, and every word on it is yours to rename. No numbers are invented."

Two things follow from that screen and both are rubric lines later.

1. The type names the opening set. Picking Trades and home services is what places fifteen seats rather than some other fifteen. The rubric's first line fails a canvas whose business type is named and whose opening set is not the one that type names.
2. No numbers are invented. The canvas arrives with no measurement of this business at all, because an invented number is worse than a blank one: a blank one gets filled in and an invented one gets believed.

5.2 The run, and the units on it

This is the run: how one offer becomes money. Read the words along the top, because those are the units, and units are the most load-bearing idea in this module.

Underneath each counter is the department that produces it, with its question written on it: How do we create awareness?, How do we convert from leads to customers?, Who goes where, and can we finish it?, How do we keep them? Those questions are the department's own, they are the same twelve questions on every canvas, and a business type may reword them.

Notice what the counters all read on a canvas that has just been opened: 0. Not a guess, not an industry average. Zero, and the dashboard says so in its own words further down.

5.3 Where the money goes, and what comes back

Three things in this frame are worth stopping on.

The fan-out. Sales does not produce one thing. It produces an order that goes to Production, a sale that goes to Finance, a customer that goes to Customer Service, and a non-customer that goes back to Marketing. Four outputs, four destinations. That is not a branch: a branch is one output going to two places, which is a different thing and needs a split. Two outputs going to two places is just a department doing its job.

The loops. Two of the arrows in that frame go back into nurture, and both are labeled already counted upstream, so it is not added to the run. A model that counted a returning lead twice would show a business converting more than one hundred percent of what arrived, which is the sort of number that ends a conversation with an owner.

The lower bank. Information Technology and Human Resources sit under everything, drawn in a hatched box that says nobody is in it. Read rule one again. That is not an omission in the drawing. It is the drawing telling you something true about this business.

5.4 Departments hold seats, and seats hold recipes

This is the same canvas one level down, and it is where the three nouns separate cleanly.

On the card for Offering Design you can read all three at once: the department, then a SEATS row with three slots, then WHAT THE SEAT HOLDS listing The Offer with 5 beside it and Pricing with 4. Five and four are counts of recipes inside those seats.

Look at the wires between the cards. Each one is labeled with a unit: OFFER, QUALIFIED, NURTURE, ORDER, PRODUCT, DELIVERY, PAYMENT, CUSTOMER, SERVICE. That word is not a description of the wire. It is the wire's type.

5.5 A port is one unit, one way, and the match is exact

A port is one thing going in or out, in its own unit, on one card. One per unit, each way. A seat that takes one unit has one in-port however many arrive; a seat that takes two different units has two.

Three rules go with it and the third is the one candidates trip on.

1. A port is typed, and the unit is the type. Because there is one port per unit, naming the unit is enough to say where a wire lands.
2. A port on a seat is derived, not authored. A seat takes what nothing inside it produces, and returns what nothing inside it consumes. Author the recipes and the seat's ports follow.
3. Exact means exact. Two ports join only when their units are the same after trimming the spaces and lowering the case. Nothing else is a match. ad image does not match ad images, or image, or creative. There is no synonym list, no stemmer and no plural table, and that is deliberate: a wire that joined on a near match would join two things nobody checked.

A thing that does not drain is not a port. It is an ingredient. A mailbox, a ledger, a CRM: a recipe needs them and never uses them up, so they are not counted on the run. That distinction saves an hour of argument the first time somebody tries to wire a mailbox to a seat.

5.6 What earns a seat, asked one question at a time

You will be given a list of work an owner does and you will have to decide which pieces are seats and which are recipes inside somebody else's seat. Do it in this order, and stop at the first yes.

A holder is an agreement, even when the work is small. That is the sentence to remember from question 3. If one named person is answerable for something on their own clock, it is a seat, however little of it there is, because the structure follows the agreement rather than the arithmetic.

5.7 A seat's agreement

Every seat carries one, and four parts of it are what the rubric names: what it takes, what it returns, the bar, and the cadence. Takes and returns are derived from the recipes inside. The bar is how you would know this worked. The cadence is how often it runs, chosen from real periods: a day, a weekday, a week on a named day, a month on a date, a quarter, or a number of times a period.

There is no "continuously". It is not offered and it is not used, and the reason is worth carrying into a client conversation: a seat that runs continuously has no moment at which anybody looks at what it did.

Beside the cadence sits the gate: where the work must stop and ask a person. A seat held by an agent defaults to "Drafts only. Never sends." A seat held by a person defaults to no gate, because the person is the gate.

5.8 An empty seat is a finding, and the canvas says so out loud

This is a canvas nobody has touched, and the product is already telling its owner four true things: six agents are not reporting anything, twelve seats nobody owns, four seats with no ceiling set, and some figures are still estimates and are marked as such.

Read the last one again. Marked so, which is the honest state, but a measured one changes decisions. That sentence is the model's whole attitude to numbers, and it is the one you will repeat most often in a diagnostic.

6. Four exercises, on your own canvas

Do these in order, on a canvas you open yourself. Each one says what you should end up with, so you can mark yourself. None of them needs anything but a browser.

Exercise 1 · Open a canvas and count what arrived

Do this. Open a new canvas. Choose Trades and home services. Skip the numbers when it offers to take them. When the orientation tour appears, skip it too.

Then answer, from the screen and not from memory:

1. How many departments does the header say the canvas has?
2. How many seats does it say were placed?
3. Which departments arrived with nobody in them at all?

What you should have. Twelve departments, fifteen seats placed, and three departments carrying no seat: Alliances, Human Resources and Information Technology. If you got twelve and fifteen and found the three, you have read the screen correctly.

Why the exercise exists. The count is not trivia. A candidate who cannot say how many seats arrived cannot later say which ones they added, and the rubric marks exactly that difference.

Exercise 2 · Read the units off the run

Do this. Stay at business level and scroll down to the chain.

Then write down, in order, the five units the counters carry, and beside each one the department that produces it.

What you should have.

Then answer one more. What number does every counter show, and why?

What you should have. Zero, on every one, because the canvas arrives with no measurement of this business. If you wrote anything else, you read an example number as a measured one, which is the mistake section 7 lists first.

Exercise 3 · Seat or recipe

Here are six pieces of work a plumbing firm does. For each one, walk the five questions under What earns a seat in order, then write down the first one that answers yes, and the verdict.

1. Answering the phone when a customer calls about a new job.
2. Checking, once a week, that the public liability certificate has not expired.
3. Writing the quote after a site visit.
4. Chasing a quote nobody answered.
5. Sending the invoice once the job is signed off.
6. Deciding, each quarter, which two postcodes to stop serving.

What you should have. Something close to this. The verdicts matter more than the exact wording of the reason.

If you marked 3 and 4 as seats, you sized the work rather than asking the questions. Both are real work and both take real judgment, and neither is held by somebody separately on their own clock.

Exercise 4 · Name three absences without filling any of them

Do this. On the same canvas, find three places where the canvas is telling you something is missing. Write one sentence for each, in this shape: what is empty, what that means about the business, and the question you would ask the owner about it.

What you should have. Three sentences that name the absence and end in a question. For example: Human Resources has no seat. This business hires without a method and without a record. Who decided the last person you took on, and what did you use to decide it?

What you must not have. A sentence that says what the business probably does. They probably use an agency for hiring is an invented fact, and on the exam it fails the rubric line that forbids stating anything the brief did not say as though the brief said it. Name the absence. Ask the question. Write nothing in the gap.

7. The common mistakes

Six, in the order candidates make them.

Mistakes 1 and 6 are the same mistake pointed in two directions, and between them they are the most common reason a candidate fails the exam: both are the habit of closing a gap rather than reporting it. The whole of this program's standard rests on the opposite habit.

8. Knowledge check

Twelve questions. Answer them from memory before you look anything up. The answers and the reasoning for each one are in this module's answer key, which is a separate document your facilitator holds.

1. Name the four floors, in order.
2. Which floor does Sales sit on, and what does that floor decide?
3. How many departments does every canvas have, and may a business type add one?
4. Which seven departments join end to end? Name them in order.
5. Which department is on the Fulfillment floor and must never be drawn in the flow, and why?
6. What is a unit? Give the unit that Marketing hands to Sales.
7. What is the final unit the chain produces, and why is it that rather than the payment?
8. Two seats carry ports whose units read completed job and completed jobs. Do they join? What do you do about it?
9. A card's entire output is consumed by exactly one other card, and nobody holds it. Seat or recipe?
10. A named person spends twenty minutes a month checking that a certificate has not expired, and nothing else consumes what they produce. Seat or recipe, and which question settled it?
11. A trades canvas opens with Information Technology carrying no seat. Is that a defect in the canvas, and what do you do about it?
12. What does the model arrive with by way of measurement of the business in front of you, and what is the argument for that?

9. The practical task

Read a canvas back to somebody who has never seen one, in writing, in one page.

Do this. Open a fresh canvas for Trades and home services. Write a one-page read-back with four parts, in this order:

1. What this business does, in the model's own words: the seven joined departments, each with the unit it hands on.
2. What arrived: how many departments, how many seats, and which departments came with nobody in them.
3. Three absences, each named, each with the question you would ask the owner, and none of them filled in.
4. Every number you state, with a word beside it saying whether it is measured, an estimate, or absent.

Pass criteria, tied to the lines you will be marked on

These are the actual rubric lines, named. This task is not marked for certification, and it is the smallest version of what is.

How to mark yourself. Lines 1, 2 and 15 are mandatory on the exam, so treat them as pass or fail here: one invented fact anywhere in the page is a fail of line 15, however good the rest is. Lines 17 and 19 are flexible, so note them and move on.

10. A facilitator's note: running this live in 90 minutes

The self-paced shape is 3 hours. Live, it is 90 minutes, and the difference is that the reading becomes a conversation and two of the four exercises are dropped.

Three things to prepare. A canvas already opened on a second screen in case the network is slow. The answer key, which you hold and the group does not. And your own honest answer to the question somebody always asks in the first ten minutes: what happens when the owner's business genuinely does not do one of the twelve. The answer is rule one, and it is worth saying in your own words before you need it.

One thing not to do. Do not open the seat card or a recipe. It is module 2 and module 3, the group will want to go there, and a facilitator who follows them loses the second half of this module and teaches neither well.

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