Murder Board is an evaluation technique. The CIA developed this technique to further develop good ideas by means of a critical team, to detect weak points and to avoid that useless ideas would be presented finally.
Find people around you that you trust enough and ask them to critique your idea as hard as they can. This group will be your personal Murder Board. You need feedback to save yourself from a belly landing with your idea or product.
By getting feedback from different people, you get different, unbiased perspectives on your idea. This way you can change or improve your idea if necessary before you sell or present it. You can accept the suggestions or not – the final decision and responsibility is yours.
The goals of the Murder Board are:
– filter out worthless ideas
– Disclose any negative aspects of an idea so that corrections can be made prior to final presentation
– Give feedback
The CIA’s Murder Board has saved the agency from gross and sometimes embarrassing mistakes over the decades – not least in attempts to destroy Fidel Castro. The CIA itself adopted the method from its predecessor agency OSS (Office Of Strategic Services), which already successfully used a similar system during World War II.