What if the most powerful decision-making tool in human history was sitting in your pocket - and most people were using it to settle arguments about which actor was in which film?
How to 'Murder' Any Problem Using AI takes a concept borrowed from police investigation - the murder board, where detectives systematically attempt to destroy their own theories before acting on them - and evolves it into a practical, accessible framework for the age of artificial intelligence. The result is not a book about productivity hacks or prompting tricks. It is a book about thinking better.
Drawing on the history of decision-making philosophy - from Aristotle's practical wisdom to Kahneman and Tversky's uncomfortable discoveries about cognitive bias - and a forensic evaluation of the frameworks that business schools have sold us for decades (SWOT, the Eisenhower Matrix, Six Thinking Hats, and their honourable but limited cousins), the book makes a clear-eyed case: human beings are biologically compromised decision-makers, and the tools we built to compensate have always depended on the honesty and knowledge of the people using them.
AI changes this. Not incrementally - fundamentally. Not by replacing human judgement, but by liberating it from the administrative fog, the groupthink, and the confirmation bias that usually surrounds it.
The book's practical heart is a series of richly developed worked examples spanning the full breadth of ordinary life: a couple at a kitchen table navigating real debt with hard choices; a headteacher whose attendance figures are falling and whose pastoral resources are stretched thin; a coffee shop owner whose lunchtime queue is hemorrhaging customers at the toasted sandwich press; a football coach whose teenagers arrive cognitively cold every single week; a pickleball doubles pair whose patience evaporates at the kitchen line with metronomic predictability. In each case, the three-phase AI murder board framework - Construction, Challenge, Implementation Review - is applied in concrete, specific, immediately usable detail.
Crucially, the book holds the method to account. Each example includes the moment where the machine gets it wrong and the human in the room gets it right - because a farmer knows the drainage system his father laid in 1976, and no satellite radar data is going to change that. The conclusion this book earns, rather than merely asserts, is not that AI is the answer to everything. It is that the quality of the questions you are willing to ask determines the quality of the decisions you make - and that, for the first time in human history, the tool that amplifies those questions is available to everyone.
Not just the McKinsey consultants and the Harley Street specialists. Everyone.
Written with the clarity of a practised educator, the warmth of someone who has spent twenty years watching intelligent people make avoidable decisions, and the dry wit of a Briton who finds most self-improvement books faintly exhausting, How to 'Murder' Any Problem Using AI is for the reader who suspects there is a smarter way to think - and is ready to be shown, concretely and without condescension, how.
