Idiom
back to the drawing board
Meaning
Indicates that one must try a different strategy in order to achieve some goal following the failure of a recent attempt.
Meaning adapted from Wiktionary, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Examples
“The plan failed, so we went back to the drawing board.”
“When the client rejected our first design, we had to go back to the drawing board and rethink everything.”
“My cake didn't rise at all, so I'm going back to the drawing board to find a better recipe before the party starts.”
“After months of testing showed the prototype was unsafe, the engineers reluctantly went back to the drawing board to redesign it from scratch.”
Examples
simple
“The plan failed, so we went back to the drawing board.”
contextual
“When the client rejected our first design, we had to go back to the drawing board and rethink everything.”
“My cake didn't rise at all, so I'm going back to the drawing board to find a better recipe before the party starts.”
complex
“After months of testing showed the prototype was unsafe, the engineers reluctantly went back to the drawing board to redesign it from scratch.”
Origin
Coined as the caption for a cartoon by Peter Arno in the March 1, 1941, issue of The New Yorker. The illustration depicted a disgruntled engineer, rolls of paper tucked under his arm, walking away from a crashed aircraft while remarking, "Well, back to the old drawing board." The plane had failed; the designs were deemed inadequate; the engineer simply returned to his desk to begin the process again. The phrase entered the language as a standard expression for total failure followed by a necessary return to the initial planning stage.
Key words
Related idioms
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