back to the drawing board

Cultural  

1. A saying indicating that one's effort has failed, and one must start all over again: “The new package we designed hasn't increased our sales as we'd hoped, so it's back to the drawing board.”

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back to the drawing board Idioms  

1. Also, back to square one. Back to the beginning because the current attempt was unsuccessful, as in When the town refused to fund our music program, we had to go back to the drawing board, or I've assembled this wrong side up, so it's back to square one. The first term originated during World War II, most likely from the caption of a cartoon by Peter Arno in The New Yorker magazine. It pictured a man who held a set of blueprints and was watching an airplane explode. The variant is thought to come from a board game or street game where an unlucky throw of dice or a marker sends the player back to the beginning of the course. It was popularized by British sports-casters in the 1930s, when the printed radio program included a grid with numbered squares to help listeners follow the description of a soccer game.

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Example Sentences

For Slot and Liverpool, it is back to the drawing board.

From BBC

Anna de Graaff says, "The extreme properties of The Cliff forced us to go back to the drawing board, and come up with entirely new models."

From Science Daily

“There needs to be a standard and we need to execute and if we don’t execute, we go back to the drawing board, we work on those things, we get better and we execute.”

From Los Angeles Times

"Strong businesses with clear fundamentals are going public, while some start-ups go back to the drawing board and reassess the future."

From BBC

"Ofcom needs to go back to the drawing board and bring forward plans to stamp out mid-contract price rises once and for all."

From BBC