Meaning
To attempt something far too big, ambitious, or complex to be realistic, especially a project whose scope should be narrowed. Nearly always used in the negative, as a warning: 'let's not boil the ocean', meaning focus on what is achievable. Business and consulting jargon. Business register; usually humorous-exaggerated and mildly critical of overambitious planning. Regional use: General English; strongest in US business and consulting contexts.
Origin
The exact origin is murky. The hyperbolic image of boiling the sea appears in early-20th-century American humour and is often attributed to the humorist Will Rogers, who reportedly joked, in response to advice about countering German U-boats, that you cannot boil the ocean so you might as well burn the cornfields; this attribution is traditional rather than securely documented. The idiomatic business use spread with management consulting and large IT projects in the 1980s and 1990s, where 'boiling the ocean' described doomed attempts to fix everything at once instead of phasing the work. A 2019 Forbes column called the phrase so ubiquitous in business that it had become a cliché ripe for retirement. The earliest print citation has not been pinned down.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- boiling the ocean
- don't boil the ocean
- let's not boil the ocean
Usage Examples
- We can't redesign every workflow this quarter, so let's not boil the ocean.
- The consultancy was accused of boiling the ocean with a ten-year transformation plan.
- Start with one region; boiling the ocean is how these programmes die.