Those Questions on the Marvel Whiteboard
What Marvel did intuitively during its recovery years
During the rebuilding years after Marvel’s bankruptcy, I happened to be in the bullpen one day.
The bullpen is a large open room where production artists worked. And bullpen is a great descriptive word for the culture — loud, crowded, alive with the particular energy of people making things under pressure.
At that time, Marvel was running lean and mean. Those with offices shared them. Even executives.
That day, the door of an executive office was open.
I noticed a whiteboard on the wall.
It was filled with questions. Not polished strategic inquiries. Raw, frustrated, necessary questions scrawled in marker by people trying to figure out why they were still doing things that no longer made sense.
Why are we still doing X?
Why are we still paying for Y?
Why are we still spending Z on this?
These weren’t jokes. They weren’t mere complaints either.
They were honest questions that someone had stopped long enough to write down.
And writing them down changed something.
“The important thing is not to stop questioning.” — Albert Einstein
Organizations in crisis typically jump to answers.
More planning. More process. More certainty-seeking. The pressure to appear decisive crowds out the space for honest questions.
But that whiteboard was different.
It made private frustration visible.
The questions were already in people’s heads — things that didn’t add up, costs that didn’t make sense, habits that had outlasted their reasons. They were noise. Invisible, unexamined, bothersome noise.
Capturing them on a whiteboard turned private noise into a shared signal.
That’s a big deal.
What stays in your head remains invisible. What you write down becomes something you can actually look at, examine, and decide what to do about.
Marvel wasn’t following a framework. They were surviving. And survival, when it strips away the comfortable habits that crisis exposes as unnecessary, has a way of forcing exactly the right questions.
The whiteboard was the result of that stripping away.
“It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question.” — Eugène Ionesco
Those whiteboard questions ultimately spawned both strategy and action, with tangible implications for the future, including the MCU. But at that time, they were just questions.
They noticed and captured the questions.
They examined what those questions meant.
They took action.
That sequence — notice, capture, examine, act — is not a method Marvel invented. They discovered it the hard way, under pressure, when comfort was no longer available to prevent the honest question.
Crisis produces clarity that comfort obscures.
Problematic questions reveal opportunity.
Most people never develop the habit of capturing their questions. They wait for the crisis to force it. And by then the window of opportunity may have already closed.
The whiteboard was Marvel’s crisis doing the work.
The whiteboard practice is how you achieve crisis clarity without waiting for one.
You do not need a bankruptcy to ask why you are still doing things that no longer make sense.
You need to be organized enough to stop and capture your own questions.
Hmm. Ouch. Wow.
Not as a system imposed from outside.
But expressing the honest questions you were already carrying — made visible before the next crisis forces them.
"What is not brought to consciousness comes to us as fate." — Carl Jung
Something to think about...
What question have you been carrying in your head that you have not written down yet?
Where are you still doing something that made sense once but you have never stopped to ask why you are still doing it?
What would change if you wrote your honest questions somewhere where you had to look at them every day?