By Lisa Hochgraf
My husband recently phoned me and wanted to "talk headlines." As a university professor, he has to publish papers to keep his position, and that night he needed to develop an abstract for a future journal article. Trouble was, he had more ideas than he could possibly include in one paper.
To help hubby sort things out, I used a traditional editorial technique for narrowing a story's focus: I asked questions, such as "who is your audience and what do they care about?" and "what was the most important outcome of making your lab class more hands-on for students?" We eventually got to a kernel that would work for him.
Nilofer Merchant says business organizations sometimes take a similar swim through many, many ideas. Only they do it when trying to select their one superior strategy--that's inclusive and complete--on which they want every employee to focus. Her approach for "killing off bad ideas so good ideas can thrive" is called "MurderBoarding."
According to her book, The New How (click to read an excerpt), MurderBoarding's purpose is to "enable a team to evalutate many options effectively, yet still converge on the winning choice in a bounded timeframe."
Merchant says MurderBoarding includes deciding what matters and establishing criteria to measure it; sorting ideas by using the criteria developed to understand the merits of one idea vs. another and to rank the ideas; testing how the top-ranked ideas could be implemented in your organization; and, finally, choosing the idea that emerges as being the right strategy for your situation, because it meets your explicit goals and its implementation throughout your organization has the right implications.
"Choosing is a remarkably straightforward step in the Murderboarding process because of the work done in the preceeding steps," writes Merchant, who will keynote at CUES Symposium: A CEO/Chairman Exchange, Feb. 2-6 at The Fairmont Orchid, Kohala Coast, Big Island, Hawaii.
"Above all, remember that strategy is not a strategy until you've chosen something," she adds. "You must choose what to do and what not to do, and you must make your decision knowing that your organization can realistically implement it. A strategy that you can't act upon is just a massive anchor holding back your organization's progress."
Lisa Hochgraf is a CUES editor.
Merchant will present "Leading in the Social Era: Leadership for a Hyper-Connected World" during CUES Symposium: A CEO/Chairman Exchange, slated for Feb. 2-6 at the Fairmont Orchid, Kohala Coast, Big Island, Hawaii. Register today!
