MurderBoarding^™

MurderBoarding is a process framework for making tough qualitative decisions during difficult times.

Charting a safe course in an unforgiving economy is a daunting challenge. It’s not uncommon for CEOs and GMs to feel like they’re damned if they do and damned if they don’t. The tendency is for executives to over react, retrench, and focus their attention on ways to cut costs without spending enough time to evaluate the company’s strengths, how they ought to move forward, and what strategy they will embrace and execute to stay competitive. Surviving and thriving require both conserving cash today and positioning the company for strength as it exits the down market.

Because tough decisions almost invariably must be made in the context of current momentum, internal politics, vested interests, and shifts in the market, the business decisions and the processes by which they are made are fraught with complicating human issues.

Faced with at best a lengthy process producing an uncertain result, executives need a proven and workable process framework for making well-considered choices about complex business strategy problems.

The answer to these questions is counterintuitive. In order to be strong, you need to get good at killing off ideas. You need to review the many ideas you’ve worked hard to generate, and put some aside so you can select from the best. And best in this sense does not mean that one idea is better than the other, but rather that one is better for your company, at this time, in this market.

The MurderBoarding process for making tough, qualitative decisions is a structured way to select, sort, and kill ideas. The MurderBoarding process is a method for distilling an entire world of possible strategies down to one actionable set of options. It is a technique for deciding which ideas are most likely to succeed in the context of a particular organization, at any given time, given the state of the particular market.

The value of the MurderBoarding process is ultimately to select one strategy. Failure to select and communicate a single strategy creates significant additional hurdles to success. The MurderBoarding process provides a way for teams to evaluate ideas against the beliefs, needs, and capabilities of the organization. The process itself is about simplifying requirements, views, and knowledge to make decisions, and then enriching the understanding more deeply so that the ultimate choice is well thought through. An organizational testing component is included in the MurderBoarding process so that strategies move from high-level directions to actionable, winning outcomes.