MurderBoarding™

It’s not about how many ideas we have, it’s how many we kill so that we end up with 1 unifying, clear answer for what matters to us and why.

That’s the philosophy behind MurderBoarding ™. MurderBoarding provides a framework for a group to arrive at a shared decision around 1 direction. While many resources offer frameworks for brainstorming, divergence of thinking, and effectively whiteboarding, this is a framework and method to make decision making, tough choices with a team, so that convergence happens.

This post makes public an online workshop in early 2010 recorded by O’Reilly Media on MurderBoarding.

The name, MurderBoarding, is a play off of the word WhiteBoarding. We often are great at generating options, creating plentiful options, but most lack a way to pick which idea is “the one”. My first book, The New How: Creating Business Solutions Through Collaborative Strategy, was almost named MurderBoarding because it is the central aspect of what allows something to become real — making that tough choice with clarity of purpose. Chapter 5 of the book is entirely focused on this methodology of moving from the imperative to the 1 idea that works best for you.

If you’d like a short story of how I came to appreciate the need for it, I shared it with Forbes in an article called, “Kill Your Darlings”.