The Roadmap Canvas: From AI Understanding to 90-Day Action
Elena returns in Chapter 11, a year after her mirror moment in Munich. She’s in San Francisco now, planning the next phase of Mirrora, and she uses the Roadmap Canvas — a five-element framework for translating understanding into action through 90-day learning cycles.
The elements: Purpose (not what you’ll build but the deeper change you seek), Plays (three concrete 90-day experiments — hypotheses to test, not commitments to defend), Risks (honest assessment via the 4-Lens Scan), Rituals (practices that keep you grounded), and Metrics (measuring meaning, not just numbers — including stories and energy levels).
David, a Michigan professor, used the same canvas to design an AI office-hours bot built to make itself obsolete. Success, as he defined it, meant students needed the bot less over time — the opposite of how most AI products measure themselves.
The instruction that sticks with me: draft version 1.0 in 30 minutes. It’s meant to be wrong. The roadmap that changes your life is the one you actually start, not the one you perfect.
Download the Roadmap Canvas from the book’s website, or explore it in full in AI and the Art of Being Human.
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The Roadmap Canvas is one of 21 practical tools from AI and the Art of Being Human by Jeffrey Abbott and Andrew Maynard. The characters and narratives in the book are fictional — designed to reveal truths about AI and being human that only stories can capture.