When a team can say clearly what matters in the decision, they will be able to see their strategy options with sharper focus and make important distinctions between the options. Deciding what matters is about getting to the heart and soul of an issue, enabling you to see the difference between an adequate strategy idea and an extraordinary one for a specific situation.

Your own experience may have already taught you that successful strategies are those where the whole organization knows the answers to questions such as: Where do we want to be? How will we know when we’re winning? What does success look like? The answers to these questions become a cohesive understanding that drives the team’s choices. The previous chapter already covered the need to track what matters in the context of developing strategy ideas, but deciding what matters (and criteria tracking) is actually applied here as part of the MurderBoarding framework (Figure 6-4).

Figure 6-4. Step 1 of the MurderBoarding framework: Decide what matters

Typically, there are only two or three things that really matter when distinguishing between strategy options. Getting to “what really matters” requires some detective work to determine what is important in your specific circumstance, with your team, and in your market or company at this particular moment.

Before considering the options, start by figuring out what should shape the decision. Ultimately, this increases the relevance of the final idea or choice. These criteria remind you, as the leader, that you’re not seeking some theoretical “best strategy,” but rather the most appropriate strategy for your specific situation. It isn’t about good or bad, right or wrong—it’s about which one fits your goals most closely.

Every organization has a number of belief systems that influence which criteria will be chosen. Some beliefs are explicit and therefore largely shared, but many are unspoken (tacit) and are typically held inconsistently throughout the organization. The tacit beliefs usually tie in to people’s underlying sense of identity and of what the firm/product/business “is.” Tacit beliefs can be problematic when they anchor people—and therefore the organization—to the past, thinking about what they’ve done or been rather than what they could do or be. The analogy of an anchor is appropriate because it’s the anchor that keeps a ship stuck, unable to maneuver away from an oncoming storm or seek out new harbors. Some organizations are so anchored that new strategies are hard to find.

Beliefs profoundly influence the organization’s vision of what success looks like. Whereas explicit beliefs are often fairly consistent across the team, tacit beliefs differ across the organization and can lead to “hidden agendas,” which are, effectively, different tacit criteria. You’ll often see tacit beliefs in teams that have been siloed and stable for a long time. The team’s criteria for success will be driven by belief systems both tacit and explicit. A common agenda is essential to implementing a successful strategy, so it is important to ensure that you surface all the tacit beliefs and the resulting hidden agendas so that the teams can align.

Tacit beliefs left unidentified can subtly lead the group to choose a strategy that is aligned with the unspoken beliefs but is less optimal for the situation at hand. It is critical, then, to identify existing beliefs, and to surface tacit beliefs and make them explicit. Surfacing tacit beliefs allows them to be reconsidered, checked to see whether they are commonly shared, and evaluated to determine whether they are still applicable or need to be changed. Writing beliefs down and speaking them out loud allows a group to understand the intent behind historical decisions and to evaluate whether those beliefs still hold true or need to be adapted to move forward. Of course, this requires a discussion to take place with the involved parties. Exploring these beliefs will lead to an understanding of what matters to this organization, and why.

Saying things out loud allows you to bring clarity of thought to what you are saying, and gives others the opportunity to challenge the ideas. This explicit dialogue can prevent a whole team from making decisions based on false assumptions, or coming to the mistaken conclusion that people are aligned in purpose when they are not.

So how can you find those tacit beliefs? What telltale signs give hints about those submerged ideas? And how do you identify the explicit beliefs so that you can make a thorough inventory of them, to help distinguish them from the hidden ones? It turns out that many clues are present in the language people use.

When executives are sharing ideas with the larger organization, they quite often embed their belief systems within their comments. These belief systems are subject to interpretation, and interpretations can vary, leading to misalignment and causing well-intentioned people to execute poorly.

Expressed organizational beliefs typically use the language of needs:

Tacit beliefs are typically notions of identity or unwritten rules for how the organization does things:

These expressed organizational beliefs and tacit beliefs can represent criteria. Being alert to the hints in the language that people use is useful to a degree, but it’s passive and therefore somewhat limited. You will also want to engage in active digging. Here are some helpful hints for unearthing important beliefs:

Bringing these criteria to the forefront at the start of the process enables you to fully consider what would be best for the business before the team gets wrapped up in one or two compelling ideas. By contrast, when criteria are not made known and explicit early, people tend to invest in ideas first and then let the ideas drive their criteria selection later in the process. (“We must pursue this idea!”)

There are two tempting simplifications that commonly arise in dealing with success factors. First, people tend to lump all success factors together and see them as equally important. This is attractive because you don’t have to wrestle with ranking the factors. But this approach does not help the selection process, so it’s actually a losing model.

The second simplification is establishing a hard-and-fast ranking. For example, suppose revenue is listed above affinity. A simplistic approach would resolve all conflicts between the two in favor of revenue, when in fact there may be cases where revenue is covered and you can afford to address affinity.

When you’re done with Step 1 of the MurderBoarding framework, you’ll have a clearly identified list of beliefs and criteria. It’s often tempting to jump the gun at this point and “make the decision.” Don’t do it! Making a decision at this stage will usually take you to a second-rate option. Instead, it’s important to take a reasonable amount of time to understand and improve your options. Step 2, Sort, is key to understanding.

Step 2 of the MurderBoarding framework pushes teams to use the chosen specific, practical criteria to understand the merits of one idea compared to other ideas. This avoids the problem of “shoot-from-the-hip” final strategy decisions based simply on someone’s “gut instinct.” Once it’s clear what success will look like and the team knows what matters to the final strategy selection, they need to test the options against the criteria, represent the results in a coherent way, and sort the options into buckets (“strong,” “possible,” “weak”) based on how they measure up against each other. In this way, the team can identify which subset of ideas they need to stop pursuing (kill) and which ones they need to explore further (Figure 6-5).

Figure 6-5. Step 2 of the MurderBoarding framework: Sort

Newcomers to the sorting step sometimes have trouble getting a sense of how much is enough and how much is too much. To clarify, a deeper example is worth pursuing here. In this case, a team looking at geographic market expansion came up with criteria for what success would look like when establishing a presence in another country. The team developed this list based on what they knew about their previous successes in other vertical markets. For them, going global meant having:

In the sorting step, the team needed to test options against the criteria. In our example, the options were the different countries under consideration. The team evaluated each country by the criteria just listed and built a thorough description of the current landscape, shown in Figure 6-6.

Figure 6-6. Doing the first sort

This picture drove the next level of questions and decisions. The team believed that some countries that appeared similar could be distinguished with the addition of one or two well-chosen criteria. After some discussion and data gathering, they added these two criteria:

After the facts were gathered, it was clear which countries would be able to drive growth. Regions such as North America and Japan already had nearly all of the criteria in place. Some countries had little investment in place to support vertical expansion, and conversations with the heads of those regions were marked by enthusiasm and interest. They were willing to commit to growth targets in exchange for incremental dollars. The qualitative discussions with the heads of the regions gave the team a clear understanding of the current state and enabled some early decisions.

Unsurprisingly, surfacing the criteria early in this process helped make sure people were, in fact, making decisions based on identified criteria. The sorting process involved many people bringing different points of view and understanding what mattered to the business. Filtering through these points of view brought up more discussion items, which ultimately led to revisiting and revising the criteria that drove their decision:

The reason you do all this as an open exercise with the team is for shared understanding. By explicitly naming criteria, then sorting, then identifying the reasoning, everyone involved knows why something is considered important. This is crucial in building an organization of co-thinkers and collaborators.

Sorting often drives more fact gathering, such as identifying which teams wouldn’t sign up to a bigger quota in exchange for additional resources. When different options impact different parts of the organization differently, the sorting process can spark trade-offs and bartering. Basically, this amounts to negotiating within the organization for additional criteria and rethinking “facts,” such as how much additional investment is appropriate. In our example, the team then summarized the results of the sorting step into a table that reflected their next level of alignment (see Table 6-1).

The sorting step gives you a set of options clearly ranked in terms of your criteria. As the situation changes or new information comes to light, you know what options to favor. For example, if the company was interested in profit first, then they would know which countries to focus on. If they had additional resources, they could invest for future revenue growth. And if they had even more dollars, they could do market development. Options were both ranked (top to bottom) and named with an action so the business leaders could see the available choices.

Take a moment to consider that the sorting step does not merely produce a document. It has a profound impact on the team in the form of a deep and shared understanding of what is at stake. The next step, Test, will involve discussions by many team members throughout the larger organization. If a dry document of sorted options had somehow been lobbed in by “experts,” how prepared would the team members be to fully vet the feasibility of various options? Make no mistake: the document is important. But an aligned team is equally important, particularly as you move forward to engage others in your organization.

Step 3, Test, is about maturing the ideas that were ranked in Step 2 (Sort), based on the criteria developed in Step 1 (Decide what matters). In Step 3, you will explore how those ideas can be implemented within your particular organization. You do this by floating the ideas by people who can lend perspective on how they will or won’t work. Organizational testing is the specific set of activities that explore what conditions exist in your company to make one course of action better than another. This step may require you to consider different options for addressing the reality of what exists in your organization. The question for Step 3 is: how do you avoid getting completely bogged down by the challenges you uncover? You may unearth the unexpected, which is why many organizations hesitate to “test” before pulling the trigger. Luckily, we take that obstacle into account in this step of the MurderBoarding framework (Figure 6-7).

Figure 6-7. Step 3 of the MurderBoarding framework: Test

Organizational testing is a process of preselling ideas to test their ability to work. During organizational testing, you’ll uncover operational points of view that didn’t arise during the generation of ideas, but will be vitally important for the final step of the four-part Select phase, Choose.

The key benefit to organizational testing is that it forces you to think cross-functionally. It helps you avoid the kinds of problems that occur when any business unit or functional area optimizes for their own needs. We’ve all seen business problems where marketing creates demand at such a high volume that operations can’t deliver, and then the company’s brand is negatively affected by this poor customer experience. This comes out of siloed behavior, though it doesn’t mean that all silos are bad. Silos can be efficient when situations are stable, and everyone can focus on their task without being distracted by activities elsewhere. But when it’s time for change, silos are one reason why organizations can make poor strategy choices.

Strategy fails when the keys to making a strategy operational cross-functionally are not uncovered soon enough. So by doing organizational testing, you are surveying other parts of the business that could be affected, to see whether a strategy can be implemented or to better understand how the strategy would play out and affect those other business areas.

The kinds of questions you want to ask during organizational testing are typically at the operational level. Does our supply chain support this? Did we think about the implications to our IT team? How will we merge our existing pipeline? Does some piece of this new strategy conflict with existing contractual obligations? Do we have what we need to provide product support in this new region? Each conversation uncovers more data: more details, more criteria for success, and more obstacles. This new information that is uncovered will result in options being improved or dropped from consideration.

Imagine, for example, that a team decides that the right thing to do to enable their next level of growth is to expand into Asia. Before presenting the decision to the senior executives, the operational leader will do an organizational test and bring the idea to the finance leader. The dialogue might look something like the following:

Organizational testing is essentially intelligence gathering to collect a set of frank, detailed comments—positive and negative—from the organization. As any tactical commander worth their salt knows, you have to do your recon before heading onto the battlefield. An organizational test generates a new list of requirements that the team must manage in order to:

This is typically the messiest step of the MurderBoarding framework, and it can be frustrating to reach the middle of the process and realize that you need to adjust your criteria yet again (Figure 6-8). Try not to get discouraged! Strategy creation is inherently a messy process. It’s supposed to be; you’re inventing the future of the company. This is exactly the time when you need to trust MurderBoarding. Have faith that this iterative process of tuning ideas and criteria drives convergence and makes the difference between fair strategy decisions and great ones. Having this step be time-bound (say, for one week) is useful because it helps everyone stay engaged.

Figure 6-8. Organizational testing can be highly iterative and messy

Step 3a: Reshape ideas

A successful organizational test typically prompts some additional evaluation of your ideas. Based on what you learn, you may need to reshape an idea and then drill down again to confirm its viability, which in turn may uncover more details, which then may require additional configurations.

Reshaping an idea is essentially a process of:

• Pulling components apart

• Understanding what parts are distinct

• Segmenting out things that no longer matter

• Getting rid of redundant options

• Restating the idea as something that more closely fits what you need

Figure 6-9 illustrates several ways that ideas can be shaped, including splitting a single idea into multiple ideas, adding distinctiveness, segmenting, culling variants, and restating. These help people to develop a shared, clear understanding, which will be incredibly important when they are doing the tasks.

Figure 6-9. Details of reshaping ideas

Being able to reshape ideas is critical to selecting your preferred strategy. In fact, reshaping good ideas based on new information is so vital that Google, a company known for allowing many to innovate, includes it as one of 18 principles baked into the company model.

Jonathan Rosenberg, Google’s SVP of Product Management and Marketing, recently spoke to his alma mater, Claremont McKenna College (CMC), and had this to say about reshaping ideas:

The next big idea is to morph ideas.... I’ve talked about how different inventions come on, and we don’t foresee their real economic impact for some time: the transistor; the laser; the VCR. I also talked about the steam engine, which was originally developed for pumping water out of flooding mines, and once you connected it to the railroads, basically you tamed the west. There are all of these technologies that are proposed as point solutions to very narrow problems.

What we have today is fast change with the underlying technology: the CPU power, the storage requirements. You’re constantly revisiting ideas that didn’t work before and reapplying them. Blogs were originally about publishing information so that people could reach niche communities. But the whole blog systems that we developed are now the engines behind publishing information in Google docs and spreadsheets, which is the next evolution for those of you who are using Gmail.^[16]

Decoding

You need to decode what people mean and understand the nuances of options so you can tune, fix, toss, or merge them. There are five common elements of decoding:

• Disambiguation. Often a term may mean different things to different groups. Localization means one thing to Software Development and another to Fulfillment. Disambiguation means eliminating fuzziness in speaking or writing so that everyone will understand it in the same way.

• Distinctiveness. Shave the fluff off an idea so that its unique, particular information is distinctly called out.

• Segmentation. Often ideas are nested within a larger item, but to fully understand the flavors of any idea, it needs to be broken into different parts.

• Tossing variants. Narrow what you are talking about to the discrete item that matters. Customization is a big term, and customizing a website is different from customizing a physical package. If you care about only one of these, be sure to exclude what you don’t mean.

• Restatement. As a conversational tool for testing, restatement can help make sure the situation is well defined. Have you ever had a conversation with someone where you thought you both were talking about the same thing, only to later realize you each meant something entirely different? Restating an idea is a way to uncover these potential misunderstandings before they cause problems.

The philosophy and approach that Jonathan describes for product reinvention is exactly what happens during Step 3 of MurderBoarding. As you learn more, you go back to original ideas to morph them. You blend many ideas together, or you take one part of one idea and merge it with another. The final picture may not look like any one element that entered the process, but that’s perfectly all right.

It should be noted that as you refine ideas, you can decide to fix part of an idea or not. By making these refine/fix decisions as a team, you will not only make more informed decisions, but you will also eliminate doubt for many people within the organization when they later make interdependent decisions. For example, a team expanding from consumer software to enterprise selling may uncover that their ordering systems are not set up to handle enterprise-wide order processing. Instead of killing the idea, they may simply decide not to fix this problem. They may decide that instead of investing in a $50M IT system, they will outsource the order processing for enterprise deals.

By contrast, a team wanting to do business globally may discover through its finance department that they are legally required to set up a separate entity to process local currency. The team may decide to invest in this separate entity because not doing it is a deal-breaker for the idea, and the idea is compelling enough to justify the investment. The point here is that trade-offs are an essential part of this tuning, fixing, tossing, and merging process.

Tip

Eliminating doubt allows for the freedom and speed to move forward rapidly.

The beauty of this process of tuning, fixing, tossing, and merging is that once an idea is ready for selection, your whole team will know, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that this idea has been made the best it can be with respect to your organization and your circumstances. Your team will have engaged in the rigorous debate of ideas, tearing them apart and reassembling them in new configurations, and discussing what works and what doesn’t. They will have asked all the critical questions, so that when you do select one final strategy in Step 4, everyone is clear on the reasoning without a shred of doubt.

Because MurderBoarding requires a team to test and refine ideas carefully, a particular idea can become so lightweight that it no longer retains its power. Be sure to ask yourself: Is this idea elegant and powerful in its simplicity? Or is it simply hollow and empty of value? If it feels lightweight, it might have gotten that way because people discarded its challenging aspects in order to avoid debating its complexity.

Remember that it takes strength to be open to new ideas. It takes courage to rethink ideas that you may have already invested in, or to sign on to a truly powerful new idea. Be sure to stay patient as you test ideas in the organization, and try to stay open to altering ideas as you learn more. Also keep in mind that there may never be enough data. Strategic decisions involve incomplete or changing information, so learn to make a choice given what you know, and identify triggers so that you can reevaluate if you learn more down the road. Stay as flexible as you can, and be ready to trim away things that might be good but not great.

The output of the organizational testing step is a set of reshaped strategic options with a reasoned understanding of what it will take to deploy each option (resources, people, costs, time, etc.). In addition, Step 3 has the curious extra benefit of creating even more permission for people to highlight or appropriately fix any problems when they come up later. MurderBoarding empowers people to be more responsive and avoid the dysfunctional, passive, “it’s not my job” bystander behavior.

Step 4, Choose, is the last and most crucial step of the MurderBoarding framework and is how you complete the Select phase of the QuEST process. If you have performed MurderBoarding correctly, the right strategy for your situation will be clear to you and your team by the time you reach this step. You will know that you have a strategy that meets your explicit goals, and you will have thoroughly explored the implications of this strategy throughout your organization. Everyone will know the reasoning behind why this strategy was selected over the others and what makes this strategy best. Choosing is a remarkably straightforward step in the MurderBoarding process because of the work done in the preceding steps. In organizations that lack the MurderBoarding process, choosing is much more painful and tricky.

It is human nature not to want to end something that looks viable or already has momentum. But choosing is about the survival of the fittest, and only the absolute fittest. Remember, by choosing what to do, you are also choosing what not to do, allowing the winning options to thrive. Many people wonder what to do with the options that did not get selected. I’ve found that if you refer to “killing” them, it can sometimes cause some backlash. So, don’t kill them. Simply set them aside, for potential future use. Just as it is hard to prune a rose bush when there are flowers blooming, it is hard to make these decisions. This is because the act of cutting can appear to be destructive rather than constructive. But the difference between one strategy option and many options is the difference between winning and simply being in the game. Reframe MurderBoarding as a constructive process, and be willing to convince reluctant people.

Let’s look at the MurderBoarding framework as a complete picture (Figure 6-10).

Figure 6-10. MurderBoarding overview

After performing the multiple steps of MurderBoarding, you’ll have both organizational alignment and organizational commitment. Everybody on the team will be able and willing to state what the strategy is and how the key criteria explain why that strategy was chosen. That’s incredibly powerful, and it also requires that our responsibilities be clear.