Before something important leaves the ground, someone has to be willing to ask an uncomfortable question: What could make this fail?

That question takes on a different meaning when the “something” is a spacecraft.

During the development of NASA’s X-43A, an experimental hypersonic aircraft, the NASA Engineering and Safety Center received a dissenting opinion raising concerns about aerodynamic issues that could affect vehicle control and mission success. The concern wasn’t simply filed away. It was brought into an independent Flight Readiness Review process where the issues could be examined, additional expertise could be brought in, and actions could be followed through before the flight.

What caught my attention wasn’t the technology. It was the willingness to create a formal place for dissent.

NASA’s experience provides an interesting example of something that applies well beyond aerospace: Sometimes the best way to strengthen an idea is to deliberately invite someone to challenge it.

As quality professionals, we spend much of our time trying to prevent failure. We look for risks, investigate problems, analyze potential failure modes, audit processes, and put controls in place to keep things from going wrong. That’s what we’re supposed to do.

But what if, occasionally, we deliberately turned that thinking around?

What if, instead of asking a team to make an idea better, we asked them to try to break it?

That’s the idea behind a murder board.

The name sounds more dramatic than the concept really is. A murder board is a deliberate attempt to challenge an idea, proposal, product, process, or decision by looking for the reasons it could fail. The people doing the challenging aren’t there simply to confirm that the team has done its homework. They’re there to look for what the people closest to the work might have missed.

The question becomes less, “How can we make this better?” and more, “Why shouldn’t this go forward?”

We’re already good at looking for failure

We already have many ways of looking for failure. FMEA, audits, risk assessments, design reviews, control plans, inspections, simulations, and lessons learned all help us anticipate what might go wrong.

Yet there’s an interesting limitation to many of these activities: The people involved are usually trying to make the idea work.

That matters. Because the longer we work on an idea, the harder it can become to see it as someone else sees it. We know the history. We know the constraints. We know why decisions were made and what alternatives were rejected. We know how much effort has already gone into the project. And those things can become blinders.

I’ve seen this in improvement work. The people closest to a problem often know more about it than anyone else, and that knowledge is invaluable. But it can also make it harder to question assumptions that have gradually become accepted as facts.

Someone who wasn’t involved in creating the idea may not have the same assumptions. They may look at the proposal and ask a question that the people closest to it stopped asking weeks or months ago: Why are we doing it this way?

Try to kill the idea

Imagine a team preparing to take an important proposal to executive management. They’ve worked on it for months. The financial model is complete, the implementation plan is ready, and the expected benefits have been calculated. The team believes it has a strong proposal.

Before the executive meeting, someone suggests taking the proposal through a murder board.

The assignment is simple: Try to kill it.

What assumption, if wrong, would undermine the proposal? Which number is management most likely to challenge? What evidence is missing? What might the customer, operator, regulator, supplier, or competitor see differently? What happens if one of the critical assumptions doesn’t hold?

The question isn’t simply, “How can we make this presentation better?” It’s closer to, “If you were sitting on the other side of the table, what would make you say no?”

That changes the conversation. Instead of defending the proposal, the team is temporarily asking people to challenge it. The purpose isn’t to create doubt for the sake of doubt. It’s to find the weaknesses while there’s still time to do something about them.

Is this just FMEA?

At first, a murder board can sound a lot like an FMEA—failure mode and effects analysis. There’s certainly overlap. Both deliberately look for ways that something can fail.

But the intent is different.

An FMEA gives us a structured way to identify and evaluate potential failure modes within a product or process. A murder board changes the perspective of the review. Instead of asking only how the system might fail, the participants are invited to challenge the thinking behind the proposal itself.

An FMEA might ask, “How could this process fail?” A murder board might ask, “Why should we not launch this process at all?”

The distinction is subtle. One is primarily analyzing the system; the other is deliberately challenging the decision and the assumptions behind it.

That doesn’t make one better than the other. They’re simply different ways of looking at the same uncertainty.

And what about a pre-audit?

The same distinction can apply to an audit. A pre-audit asks whether we’re ready for the auditor. The murder-board perspective is slightly different: If we were the auditor, where would we challenge the organization?

That shift can be useful, because it encourages us to look at the situation from outside our own preparation. Instead of demonstrating that everything is in order, we start wondering what another person might question. And the same thinking could apply before an important customer review, a product launch, a major capital investment, a new process, or a significant organizational change.

The common thread isn’t the type of review. It’s the deliberate introduction of a perspective that’s willing to challenge the proposal.

How might this work?

This is where the concept can either become useful or remain an interesting idea.

A murder board doesn’t necessarily require a special software system, a complicated methodology, or a formal committee. For a management team trying the idea for the first time, the mechanics could be quite simple.

Put the proposal where everyone can see it. A whiteboard and a collection of sticky notes may be enough. Bring together several people who weren’t responsible for creating the proposal, or at least people who can look at it from different perspectives. Before the discussion begins, make the purpose clear: This isn’t a session to defend the idea. It’s an opportunity to find what could make it fail.

One way to begin is to give everyone a few minutes to put concerns on the board before the discussion starts. That can help reveal ideas that might otherwise be lost to the first few voices in the room. The notes then become the starting point for a discussion about assumptions, evidence, unanswered questions, and potential consequences.

The important part is what happens during that discussion. A concern doesn’t have to be accepted simply because someone raised it, but it shouldn’t have to survive an immediate defense, either. It might be worth asking what assumption sits behind the concern, what evidence supports that assumption, and what could be done to test it.

The sticky notes aren’t the murder board. They’re simply one way to begin changing the behavior of the group.

For higher-consequence decisions, the process could become much more formal. Reviewers might be selected from outside the originating team, given the proposal in advance, and asked to identify vulnerabilities independently before coming together for a facilitated review. Concerns could then be documented, investigated, assigned, and brought back for resolution.

That’s much closer to what we see in high-stakes environments such as NASA, where independent reviewers, appropriate expertise, mechanisms for dissent, actions, and follow-up are part of the review process.

The principle remains the same whether the tool is a sticky note or a formal review board: Change who is looking, and change what they are being asked to look for.

Keep the challenge on the idea

There’s an important cultural condition behind all of this.

A murder board could easily become counterproductive if people believe that finding a problem means finding someone’s fault. The intent isn’t to identify who made the mistake. It’s to identify what could make the project fail. That distinction can disappear quickly in a room full of people who’ve spent months developing something they believe in.

One way to keep the discussion constructive is to put the challenge on the board rather than on the person. Instead of saying, “John didn’t consider the supplier problem,” the concern could be framed as, “Supplier capability at projected volume?” Instead of questioning someone’s competence, question the assumption. Instead of asking who missed something, ask what we need to know.

This also changes the role of the person who raises the concern. They don’t necessarily have to have the answer. Their contribution may simply be to illuminate something the rest of the team had not considered.

That’s where psychological safety becomes practical. If people learn that thoughtful dissent is welcome, they’re more likely to offer it the next time.

The value of the outsider

There’s a reason external review appears repeatedly in high-consequence work: The outsider doesn’t carry the same history.

Someone who wasn’t involved in creating the proposal may not understand why a particular decision was made. They might ask a question that seems obvious to them but that the team stopped asking months ago.

That doesn’t mean the outsider is automatically right. It means they have a different starting point.

The Defense Acquisition University has used the term murder board for an external review following an internal review, involving senior functional experts outside the originating team. The terminology may vary from organization to organization, but the underlying principle is familiar: Let people who weren’t responsible for creating the work challenge it before changing it becomes expensive.

That’s perhaps one of the simplest ways to think about the concept: First, do our best work. Then invite someone to challenge it.

Timing matters

A meaningful challenge can’t be a ceremony held immediately before the decision. If the murder board occurs after the proposal is effectively finished, the organization could be asking people to identify problems at precisely the moment when everyone has the least appetite for changing anything.

There’s another example from NASA that comes to mind.

Consider the space shuttle Challenger disaster, a catastrophe attributed to O-rings that failed during launch. The concerns were known right up until the launch, but the mission had gained such momentum that the decision was made to proceed—with tragic results.

The earlier a meaningful challenge can occur, the more options will remain available. There’s still time to learn, test assumptions, change direction, or strengthen the proposal.

That doesn’t mean every idea needs a formal adversarial review before it’s had a chance to develop. It simply suggests that challenge is most useful when it can still influence the outcome.

Better decisions, not more criticism

A murder board shouldn’t be judged by how many problems it finds.

Finding 20 concerns isn’t necessarily better than finding two. What matters is whether the process improves the decision. Some concerns will turn out to be unfounded. Others will require more information. Some will lead to changes in the proposal. And, occasionally, someone might uncover a problem serious enough to stop the project.

That last outcome can be uncomfortable. It can also be enormously valuable. Better to discover the fatal flaw in the conference room than in the marketplace. As quality professionals, we’re already accustomed to looking for failure. Perhaps what we haven’t always done is deliberately invite someone to disagree with us before the decision becomes difficult to change.

A murder board doesn’t replace FMEA, audits, risk assessments, or the other disciplines we already use. It adds something different—a deliberate opportunity for dissent.

That might be its real value. It gives an organization a way to remove its blinders before reality removes them. And that brings me back to the question that started this exploration: What if the best way to strengthen an idea is to try to destroy it?

References

1. “Dissenting Opinions and Flight Readiness Review (FRR) Process.” NASA Engineering and Safety Center, 2004. Lesson 1413.
2. NTRS-NASA Technical Reports Server. “NESC Annual Report 2004.”
3. Moschler, Joe; Weitzner, Jim. “Nine Steps to a Better Statement of Work.” Defense AT&L, Nov./Dec. 2012, p. 27.
4. Report of the Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident. “Chapter VI: An Accident Rooted in History.” June 6, 1986.