What Murdle Knows About Monday Morning

Monday morning can sometimes resemble the opening scene of a detective story.

A project has died unexpectedly.

A decision has vanished.

Nobody knows where the budget went.

There are several suspects.

And somewhere in the building is a person saying, “I thought Finance were doing that.”

By 9.17am it is perfectly possible to regard the entire week as evidence of wrongdoing.

Which may be why I have recently developed an affection for Murdle.

If you have not encountered it, Murdle is the wonderfully named series of murder-mystery logic puzzles created by G. T. Karber.

You are given suspects, weapons, locations and clues. You eliminate possibilities. You fill in the grid. Gradually the apparently confusing situation becomes less confusing.

Somebody did it.

They did it somewhere.

They used something.

There is an answer.

This is considerably more reassuring than most Monday meetings.

First there was Wordle

The name Murdle is not accidental.

Its creator has explained that the original puzzle had a much longer and considerably less marketable title.

Then Wordle happened.

Josh Wardle's wonderfully simple five-letter puzzle went from a tiny game made for his partner to a global daily ritual in a matter of months.

At one point its audience had gone from roughly 90 daily players to around two million in only a few weeks.

The New York Times eventually bought it for a seven-figure sum.

Wordle demonstrated that millions of otherwise sensible adults would willingly interrupt their morning to stare at a small grid and become surprisingly emotional about the position of the letter E.

Karber noticed.

He already had the murder puzzles.

The explosion of Wordle suggested the daily format.

And, crucially, it suggested a much better name.

Murder met Wordle.

Murdle.

It is almost annoyingly good.

The game was put online, the books followed, and the whole thing became something of a phenomenon in its own right.

The Murdle books became a #1 Sunday Times bestseller, a USA Today bestseller and the British Book Awards Book of the Year. (Murdle)

But what interests me is not simply that people like Murdle.

It is that people like puzzles at all.

The Big Idea

A puzzle changes the emotional character of uncertainty.

Consider two sentences.

“We have a problem.”

And:

“We have a puzzle.”

They can describe almost exactly the same situation.

But they do not feel the same.

A problem arrives carrying weight.

Something is wrong.

Somebody may be responsible.

We should probably have fixed it already.

A puzzle creates a slightly different instinct.

What do we know?

What are the clues?

What doesn't fit?

What are we assuming?

What happens if we move this piece over here?

That small shift matters.

It does not magically solve anything.

But it can move us from defence towards curiosity.

And curiosity is often a considerably more useful place from which to think.

The attraction of the grid

One of the pleasures of Murdle is that confusion is temporary.

At first there are too many possibilities.

Then you learn something.

One suspect cannot have been in the library.

The candlestick was somewhere else.

Someone has lied about the conservatory.

A few boxes receive crosses.

A few receive ticks.

The world gets smaller.

This is deeply satisfying.

Real life, regrettably, does not usually provide a printed deduction grid.

But quite a lot of work can still be approached in the same spirit.

Take a project that is running late.

The normal workplace response is often:

Why is this such a mess?

Try replacing it with:

What is actually preventing the next step?

That produces a different investigation.

Perhaps the problem is not that everybody is overloaded.

Perhaps one decision has not been made.

Perhaps the decision cannot be made because one piece of information is missing.

Perhaps the information exists but nobody knows who owns it.

Suddenly:

THE PROJECT IS FAILING

has become:

WE NEED SARAH TO CONFIRM THE DELIVERY DATE.

That is progress.

What is your Monday Murdle?

There may be one hiding in your working week already.

Perhaps:

The meeting puzzle

Why do twelve intelligent people regularly spend an hour together without making the decision they assembled to make?

The inbox puzzle

Why does one apparently harmless email keep generating eleven replies?

The diary puzzle

Why is there never time for the thing everybody says is the priority?

The customer puzzle

Why does the same complaint keep returning in slightly different clothes?

The colleague puzzle

Why does somebody perfectly reasonable become extraordinarily difficult whenever one particular subject comes up?

The Friday puzzle

What has to be true by Friday for this to count as a good week?

That last one may be particularly useful.

Because sometimes the great mystery of Monday is not how to do all the work.

It is working out which work actually matters.

Four questions for the amateur workplace detective

You do not need a magnifying glass.

A slightly furrowed brow is sufficient.

When something annoying happens this week, try asking:

1. What do I actually know?

Not what everybody assumes.

Not what somebody said three meetings ago.

What is established?

2. What am I treating as fixed that might not be?

Deadlines.

Processes.

Meeting lengths.

Who needs to approve something.

The order in which tasks happen.

Many workplace constraints turn out to be habits wearing official clothing.

3. What single clue would make this easier?

An answer.

A number.

A conversation.

A decision.

A piece of customer feedback.

Sometimes the most useful question is simply:

What would I need to know next?

4. What is the smallest possible solution?

Puzzles become easier when possibilities disappear.

Work often does too.

The danger of becoming terribly serious

There is another reason puzzles may be useful at work.

They remind us that thinking can be enjoyable.

Modern professional life has become remarkably solemn about cognition.

We optimise.

We strategise.

We conduct root-cause analyses.

We identify deliverables.

Very rarely does somebody enter a project meeting and say:

“This is an interesting little puzzle.”

Perhaps they should.

Because a certain amount of intellectual playfulness makes difficult work easier to approach.

Not frivolity.

Not pretending that consequences do not matter.

Just the recognition that there can be pleasure in figuring something out.

A blocked process can become a puzzle.

A difficult timetable can become a puzzle.

A communication failure can become a puzzle.

A blank piece of paper certainly is one.

Even Monday can become:

Let's see if we can work out what this week is actually asking of us.

That is quite different from:

Here we go again.

One thing to remember

The useful thing about a puzzle is that it turns uncertainty from a threat into an invitation.

You do not have to solve everything today.

You simply need to spot one clue.