back to the drawing board
- 1Used to indicate that an attempt has failed and a new strategy must be started from the very beginning.
Like a chef scrapping a failed recipe and beginning again with a completely different approach.
After the prototype overheated during testing, the engineers were sent back to the drawing board.
The marketing campaign flopped badly, and the agency had to go back to the drawing board.
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Origin
The expression was coined as the caption "Well, back to the old drawing board." for a Peter Arno cartoon in The New Yorker on March 1, 1941, which depicted an engineer walking away from a crashed plane.