44. Prioritizing Your Priorities with Even/Overs
About this episode:
Original Air Date: August 16, 2020Prior to the 1940's, the word priorities (plural) was rarely used. Because the word priority means that which comes before anything else. It's one thing! But these days, it's not uncommon for leaders and boards to demand multiple, often contradictory outcomes at the same time. We want faster output AND higher quality. We want to grow market share in our core category AND open three new categories. We want to hit the impossible target AND have work life balance. But as the saying goes, if everything is a priority, then nothing is a priority. What we need is a way to make tradeoffs explicit and strategic. And that's exactly what "over" statements and "even over" statements do. They ask us to put one good thing even over another good thing.
In this episode, Aaron Dignan and Rodney Evans discuss how to create and leverage even over statements, and how they can help any team at any level focus on what truly matters now.
As promised, we've also included three of our even/over statements for the Brave New Work podcast here in the show notes:
Authenticity e/o Polish (We keep it real, including the occasional curse word)
Depth e/o Breadth (We'll do a whole episode—or five—on prioritization)
Brevity e/o Freedom to Roam (We try to keep it snappy and we ask guests to do the same)
Tools from The Ready:
Workbook: The Essential Intent Workbook
Resource: Introduction to Even/Over Statements
Video: Demo of Crafting Even/Overs
Mentioned in this episode:
Tom Thomison and HolacracyOne: BNW Ep. 16 with Thomas Thomison
Patagonia’s “Don’t Buy This Jacket” ad campaign
“essential intent”: BNW Ep. 90 with Greg McKeown
“governance episode”: BNW Ep. 43
“hiring episode”: BNW Ep. 14 with Kate Glazebrook
In this episode:
Aaron Dignan
Rodney Evans
Listen now:
Episode transcript:
Aaron Dignan:
And if you want to mix things up, you can keep it simple in other ways. Like there's the sushi burrito place where they only serve one thing, but it's a sushi burrito. That's interesting, but don't do sushi and burrito.
Rodney Evans:
Yes, please. Please don't.
Aaron Dignan:
Gross.
[Intro music]
Aaron Dignan:
Hey everybody, welcome to the show. This is Brave New Work, a podcast about reinventing our organizations and the search for a more adaptive and human way of working. I'm Aaron Dignan, and I'm joined as ever by my co-host, Rodney Evans.
Rodney Evans:
Hello Aaron and everyone else.
Aaron Dignan:
On today's episode, we're going to talk about even/over statements, a form of strategy and prioritization. But before we prioritize that, let's emphasize a check-in round.
Rodney Evans:
Okay. Let's do it. As we'll all learn if we don't already know it, even/overs are used for making trade-offs. So we're going to do a check-in round question that's related, and that is this. What is a difficult trade-off that you have made and did it pan out for you?
Aaron Dignan:
Yeah, I mean I think probably in my personal life, the biggest recent trade-off was deciding to move from New York to Colorado, which was all about prioritizing sanity and being close to family for my son who is the grandson to many people who live in Colorado. And just being closer to a support structure, even/over being in the hustle and bustle of it all of the world's biggest city and frankly, prioritizing networking above everything else.
Rodney Evans:
Nice.
Aaron Dignan:
And I think it worked out so far. I wasn't sure if I would be able to stay fully in business and connected to the world, but it was working fine even before the pandemic. And then when the pandemic happened, it was like, no, really the world wants this to work for you. This is not a problem.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah. All right, cool. A lot of these pop into my brain, but there's one that I think because my best friend is here and we're talking a lot about her moving, and so I'm thinking a lot about real estate at the moment. So when we moved to Durham from Manhattan, we were renting because we didn't know what we were doing. And then when we started looking at houses here in Durham, we really wanted to be walking distance to all of the things because we're city people and it's a big adjustment, blah, blah, blah. Anyway. Then we fell in love with this neighborhood that is not a walking distance neighborhood, and I found my dream house. It was like everything I ever wanted in a house. It was like mid-century with built-in cherry banquettes and a sunken living room and a Japanese rock garden. It had it like a music studio off the garage. It was just like the house that was made for me in 1965 and then just preserved perfectly.
Aaron Dignan:
Just waiting for you.
Rodney Evans:
It was exactly where we wanted to spend... I mean, it was everything, but it wasn't walking distance and we had an even/over that was really walk to the things even/over other stuff we want. A lot of other stuff. There were a lot of other things on the other side of that even/over. And so we did not buy that house and we built a house in the neighborhood that we wanted and I really haven't looked back. It was totally the right thing, but if I had not had that very clear trade-off in my head, I think that I probably would have revisited that decision a lot of times, especially if we had ended up not actually walking or not actually engaging, but we use those things every single day of our lives.
Aaron Dignan:
Yeah, it's funny that you mentioned that because I actually think house hunting and apartment shopping are probably the first place in life where people really play the trade-offs game-
Rodney Evans:
Totally.
Aaron Dignan:
... in a meaningful way. And so it's like the best place to start the lesson about even/overs in some way, which is just like you can't have all the stuff, can't have everything. So what are you going to choose and how will you make that guide your decisioning?
Rodney Evans:
And it's a place where even... I think there are other places in this life, and we'll talk more about this, where if you have enough resources or you have enough time or you have enough money, maybe you don't have to make the same kind of trade-off. But with real estate, a lot of times it doesn't matter. You have to make a trade-off because you just usually can't get everything that you want in the exact place at the time that you want a house. It's just so unlikely.
Aaron Dignan:
Yeah. And even if you do have unlimited funding, if you're Jeff Bezos buying his 10th home, you still have to make choices. You can't be by the beach and by the downtown. You can't be like simultaneously, right?
Rodney Evans:
Exactly.
Aaron Dignan:
You have to pick, do you want to be nearer to this or nearer to that? Do you want it to be taller or shorter, older or newer?
Rodney Evans:
You have to pick.
Aaron Dignan:
So, there's something to it.
Rodney Evans:
Nice.
Aaron Dignan:
You have to pick.
What are even/overs and where did they come from?
Rodney Evans:
We are already starting to dive into even/overs, which is so much fun to do, and I feel like this is one of those tools or tactics that we use that once you see the world through the lens of even/over statements, it's very difficult to unsee it and apply it to everything. So let's talk a little bit about even/over statements. Maybe just ground us in where they came from as far as we know and what are they and how do we use them?
Aaron Dignan:
Yeah, so it's funny, I've had trouble with the provenance of this one, but what I do know is that the Agile manifesto, which is a couple decades old, has over statements in it. So like working software over comprehensive documentation, or customer collaboration over contract negotiation. And at the bottom of these four Agile manifesto over statements, there's a little note that says, "That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more." And so they're basically just saying like, "We're not trying to shit on the stuff on the right, we're just saying if we have to choose, we're going to push for the stuff on the left."
And more recently we've seen the same idea brought to life in the even/over statement, which I had introduced to me by former guest, Tom Thomison, one of the early players in the Holacracy space and co-founders. And so I think that the even/over phrasing may have come from the HolacracyOne folks or maybe they borrowed it from someone else, but there's not a clear trail or there's not a clear sort of breadcrumbs on the internet that goes back any further than that. So we know that prioritization has been happening for a long time. We know that over statements have been around.
I like the even, because it puts the little line at the bottom of the Agile manifesto right into the statement. Instead of having to say, "While we value this even/over that," you can just say, "I like this even/over this other thing." And it sort of suggests that you care about both or that both are valid and important. So yeah, that's as much as I know at least about the history. If any listeners can write in or call in and let us know more, that'd be awesome. But what we do know is that their usefulness is quite profound.
So in most business environments that I've been in, I'm sure you will agree, there's a little bit of we can have it all madness going on, where it's like, "Oh yeah, we're going to have growth and margin and revenue growth and people are going to work a 40-hour week and we're going to all sing "Kum ba yah" and everything's going to work great. We're going to do more software of higher quality to more customers all the time." And that is something that I think happens because of the pressures and the challenges of just a growth even/over everything culture. But the reality is that there are always trade-offs, theories of constraints apply, physics applies, and we do have to make choices.
What's nice about the even/over statement as an asset is if we as a team come up with it, if we work on how to express it, if we understand it together and then we consent to it, we have a thing that will help us make a thousand other decisions over the course of the next many months or years guided by this trade-off that we've already made explicit, which is like, "Hey, if we can't have everything, we're going to prioritize this thing over that thing." And I think that's it. It's really about clarity of those trade-offs, about knowing when you're veering away from that intentionally, and it's such a simple thing. It's the time to sit down and write some statements on Post-it notes that can transform your ability to execute a strategy and your ability to empower and to steer autonomously and all that. So I think that's the preamble as I know it.
Rodney Evans:
And what happens in our work a lot is, particularly at the executive level, you get a lot of the guidance or you hear a lot of the guidance of like "it's both/and." And just like in the real estate example, even if you are fortunate enough to be in a position where you can just add resources to a team or you can just throw money at the problem or whatever, there are always constraints. The world is not just both/and when it comes to production of anything or it comes to outcome of anything. There is cognitive load, there's energetic load, there is complexity that's added by continuing to add.
And so if you happen to be one of the people who's listening to this preamble and being like, "We don't have to make those trade-offs because we're wildly successful and unconstrained," you are lying to yourself. We all lie to ourselves like how I can't have that mid-century house on the small corner lot that we actually ended up living in. That is the nature of trade-offs. And the smarter we are about making them, the sooner we can get out of both/and, or either/or, and do this work instead.
Why more options doesn’t mean a better decision
Aaron Dignan:
I also think it's worth stating just right out of the gate that more is not always better.
Rodney Evans:
So true.
Aaron Dignan:
And so one of the best things about even/over statements is saying when we think about strategy, when we think about behavior and we think about how we show up and how we team, saying we can have it all is a cop out, A, because it's not true. But B, it's not necessarily better to be everything, to be all things to all people. A lot of what a brand and a strategy is about, is about setting out territory that's only your territory and saying like, "This is the way we're going to play. We're going to be different, and the way we're going to be different is we're going to prioritize something even/over what everyone else thinks is cool." And so that's a big part of it to me too, is sometimes it feels like you're making me choose and there's loss aversion, but I think no, no, no. It's competitively intelligent to be like, "Well, everyone else's books are thick, ours are thin, not because we can't be thick, but because we choose not to be."
Rodney Evans:
Literally, Ed will not enter a restaurant where he thinks that the menu is too big.
Aaron Dignan:
Exactly, The Cheesecake Factory.
Rodney Evans:
He's a trained chef, and he looks at a menu that's four pages long and he just goes like, "No, they don't know what they're doing." Because nobody can do everything essentially well.
Aaron Dignan:
That's right.
Rodney Evans:
And so rather than kidding ourselves to say we're a diner and a Korean place and tacos too, it's like, no, be the "thin book"-
Aaron Dignan:
Stop it.
Rodney Evans:
... that does breakfast burritos better than anybody else.
Aaron Dignan:
Right. And if you want to mix things up, you can keep it simple in other ways. There's the sushi burrito place where they only serve one thing, but it's a sushi burrito. That's interesting, but don't do sushi and burrito.
Rodney Evans:
Yes, please. Please don't.
Aaron Dignan:
Gross.
Examples of a good even/over statement
Rodney Evans:
Before we talk about where we would use even/over statements, let's talk about some good ones that we've seen and used so that everybody's got a shared mental model. So Aaron, hit me with the highlight reel even/over statements.
Aaron Dignan:
The one I always harp on in workshops is "market share even/over margin" as a kind of implicit Amazon strategy because both are fun, love to make profit, love to have market share, have to pick whether we're going to spend our free cashflow and growing the number of people that use our stuff or whether we're going to pocket it. And the other statement works too. There are definitely companies that are in a profit mode where they're like, "We don't need to get any bigger, we just need to be profitable and execute well." So I like that one as an example.
Another one that's pretty common, particularly in software development is "quality even/over volume", like how much we're shipping. And so do you want to have really high quality stuff or do you want to have stuff that's updating and adapting and changing all the time and push, push, push. And you can debate which way to put that statement. It's also another good example of how these things intersect. So if you have an agile approach and you have a really tight feedback loop, you might be able to focus on amount of ships and actually get quality, but you might not. It might turn out that you just can't wrangle that and you have to prioritize it the other way. So I like that one.
I like "sustainability even/over maybe short-term growth or profitability." So you could burn all your bridges and sell a bunch of stuff to people that don't need it and then have to kind of flee town, the Ponzi scheme approach. Or you could be like, no, we're in it for 20 years, a hundred years. And so you make very different decisions in service of that kind of sustainability. Or even literal "ecological sustainability even/over profit" or even/over convenience, where you're just like, "Yeah, we're going to have a LEED-certified building and it's going to be more expensive and it's going to take longer to build, and that's just the trade-off we're going to make." So, I don't know, that's a few right off the top of the noggin.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah. I also have seen a bunch that are very literally about prioritizing one product over another or one class of products over another.
Aaron Dignan:
Totally.
Rodney Evans:
We had a client for a long time that you and I both did work with that was really trying to move to becoming a very digital organization, and they really doubled down trimester after trimester on digital products, even/over legacy products. And they had to do that so that the funding and the resourcing and the focus and attention would follow.
Aaron Dignan:
Right. Right.
Rodney Evans:
And I've worked with other clients where they picked the one business line that for one quarter they really wanted to invest in and focus on or one customer segment and knew that that would come at the cost potentially of others. The other ones that popped into my mind are, I have some greatest hits around more behavioral stuff like "candor even/over comfort" or "learning even/over executing" or "feedback even/over friendship."
Aaron Dignan:
Nice.
Rodney Evans:
These are things that... The thing that's interesting about even/overs is we don't always know that one will come at the cost of the other. Sometimes we do, but sometimes we don't. But sometimes just saying out loud the thing that we're afraid we're going to pay with can be really helpful. So, I don't necessarily know that if I give you really critical feedback that you don't want to hear that it's going to impact our friendship. But if that's the reason that I haven't, then it can be helpful for us to articulate out loud and intentionally that even if it costs us some friendship points, we're willing to do it for the sake of honesty.
Aaron Dignan:
That's interesting. Yeah. And it's funny, if you're listening at home, you can play this game, obviously worth throwing these off the top of our heads from many workshops and years doing this, but you can play the game just by looking at a category. So look at something like fast food burgers and grab In-N-Out Burger and McDonald's and hold them up and then say, what are their even/overs? And so you can look right away and say, all right, well In-N-Out has a much smaller menu, so clearly they're prioritizing simplicity or operational efficiency even/over breadth and having something for everyone. There's no salads. It's a real priority that has real consequences. And so yeah, you can do that in any category. You look at two restaurants, two movie theaters, two law firms, and say like, what are they prioritizing even if they don't know they're doing it, even if they're not aware of the trade-offs they're making?
Rodney Evans:
Yes. And same inside of a system. Even if they're not comparing company to company or restaurant to restaurant or whatever, just go into all literally anything. Go into a house and see like, are they prioritizing cleanliness even/over downtime, or are they prioritizing design even/over comfort? I mean, just look around in any context and you will see the trade-offs that people have made, even though many are made without a lot of consideration.
Aaron Dignan:
I had a friend growing up in high school whose mother put the plastic coverings over all the couches.
Rodney Evans:
Wow.
Aaron Dignan:
And I always thought that was such an odd even/over, because it's like clean couch even/over any usability at all.
Rodney Evans:
Useful couch.
Aaron Dignan:
There's no use it. We're going to prioritize cleanliness even/over the purpose of the item.
Rodney Evans:
This to me though, is a shitty even/over because what is the thing that we are really getting from that?
Aaron Dignan:
I think, well, it's an even/over you can disagree with, but what they're getting is the sense that no one's going to ruin their couch. It's the safety of their assets, like my stuff is clean and safe.
Rodney Evans:
This is an interesting conversation because even when something does not make sense, like it doesn't to us intuitively in this moment, if you usually peel back the onion a little bit, you can find something that is very essential and very human motivation oriented.
Aaron Dignan:
Right.
Rodney Evans:
So when you said that, I was like, "Oh, right, they're prioritizing prevention of loss even/over enjoyment of the home."
Aaron Dignan:
Usefulness and enjoyment. Yeah, exactly.
Rodney Evans:
And it's like that's a real... People prioritize scarcity even/over abundance all the time.
Aaron Dignan:
Totally.
Rodney Evans:
All time.
Aaron Dignan:
Totally.
Rodney Evans:
Because scarcity does get you something, even though off on its face you're like, "Ugh, boo, nobody likes that." It's like, no, actually though, that calms the human nervous system in a certain way. Risk aversion makes us feel maybe comfort. There's always layers to these things no matter how sort of surface they might appear.
Aaron Dignan:
And it sort of brings us to rule number one of the even/over, which is it should work both ways and you should be able to get to that... As you peel the onion, you should be able to get to that truth that's like, "All right, I could argue this either way and still be right as long as I'm getting something." Whereas a terrible even/over statement will put something that's completely negative and not interesting on the right side, and then you're like, "Well, that's not a real trade-off at all."
Rodney Evans:
That's not a real trade-off. It's like your and my very vastly divergent views on sleep. It's like a compelling even/over in my life is not a good night's sleep even/over video games, but that's a compelling even/over in your life.
Aaron Dignan:
That's right. Yeah, sometimes.
Rodney Evans:
Giving up video games is not a difficult thing for me in order to prioritize sleep, considering I'd rather be sleeping than doing literally anything.
Aaron Dignan:
Well, yeah, and also like you said about the layers of the onions, when you peel it away, it's not actually about video games, it's about social connection with old friends, and that's worth staying up late for. But if was-
Rodney Evans:
Maybe in your even/over, not mine. I'll see them on the weekend.
Aaron Dignan:
Fair enough.
Do even/overs mean giving up the other option?
Rodney Evans:
So those are some common ones. Aaron's absolutely right, it should not be something great over something terrible that defeats the whole purpose. The other thing that you might notice if you think about the examples that we just gave, is that often by prioritizing the thing on the left, you ultimately will get the thing on the right. It's just that sometimes it's about sequencing. So in the instance where say you prioritize candor even/over comfort, and what we mean by that is where you have a team of people, for example, that because they want to maintain the harmony in their relationships, don't tell each other the truth about things.
And so if that group of people calls out, okay, for this quarter we're going to prioritize candor even/over this comfort, what you might find at the end of that quarter is that we have a new level of comfort being candid with each other and it no longer feels like a trade-off. That's a thing that happens a lot. When we prioritize growth even/over margin, what we often find at the end of that quarter is that there's less margin pressure. So it's not like one might come at the expense of the other, but often what you find is you do get both. It's the discipline of choosing for a period of time. That's where the magic is.
Aaron Dignan:
Yeah. My favorite example of this that I think I've mentioned on the show before is Patagonia when they're like, "Don't buy this jacket." They run that ad and they're just like, our sustainability priority means that we're just going to tell you like, "Shit, don't buy our stuff anymore. Put us out of business." And then of course, everybody runs out and buys the jacket because they know it's the most sustainable jacket, and so technically more jackets are made sustainably than they were before the ad was run. They have more sales. The whole thing is very surprising. So there's definitely a lot of examples of that.
How to apply even/overs to future of work principles
Rodney Evans:
It's a cool inversion. Let's talk a little bit about where these even/over statements fit with some of the other practices we've talked about on this show. So we just very recently did a show on principles. We have talked on this show about the idea of orienting toward outcomes and talking in the past tense versus plans and goals and what might happen. How do you fit even/over statements with some of those other tools or ways of working?
Aaron Dignan:
Well, I think even/over statements are good at the outset of anything across the different scales. So it certainly fits into chartering and initiating a project or a team that I think that's a fine place to play this game. And usually that'll be a little bit more behavioral or more about team dynamics, but it doesn't have to be. When you zoom out to the unit level or the business level, I think it connects to essential intent to a large degree. You do the strategy work to figure out roughly where do we want to be or what's our vector to get towards our purpose? And then you start to ask questions about, well, what kinds of trade-offs are going to be helpful, potentially unnatural for us, unlikely to happen if we don't make them clear, or just super useful in this moment of trying to pursue this essential intent?
And so it is to me kind of coming out of a retrospective, coming out of an essential intent conversation, a great time to just say, is there anything we can make explicit that would help us with the myriad of choices and judgements we're going to have to make over the next few years or even few months for that matter, where a statement like this can be useful, or even a debate about a statement like this can be useful?
I sometimes find that within The Ready, we often end up in similar places with even/overs because it's a small business, it's a simple business in its strategy at least. And a lot of the things that we really do prioritize and trade off, we all hold pretty sacred compared to the average. But then what it leaves is this narrow territory for discussion, but I still find it useful even if we come back to we're going to prioritize growth even/over profitability or we're going to prioritize our collective experience even/over our individual experience again and again. It's the debate, it's the unpacking that's valuable for people to just be like, "Ah, yeah, I see where everyone else is coming from on this. I see the sides of the trade-off. I see how we play this game."
Rodney Evans:
Right. And I think a good example of that within The Ready where it was a little bit more controversial was like we did some Essential Intent work a couple of retreats ago where there were some very specific ideas about growth discussed and written down. And I remember you and I getting into a pretty spirited debate about what really the lever for growth is at The Ready. And where we came out on it after a lot of toing and froing was like, we get very motivated about growth in terms of attracting new clients when we have members to do the work.
Aaron Dignan:
Extra members.
Rodney Evans:
Extra members. When we have capacity that is hungry, we sell work.
Aaron Dignan:
Then we get hungry.
Rodney Evans:
And when we have prospective clients who want work and we don't have members ready to go, we get less hungry.
Aaron Dignan:
Get passive, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Rodney Evans:
We get lazy because we're like, "We're all fed, we're all sleepy. Let that one go by." And I remember you and I having this very spirited debate about this thing and basically coming down on the even/over of hiring members even/over getting clients because we know from experience and retrospecting and our own patterning now what motivates us collectively and what doesn't.
I say this to say, I think about whether you're doing outcomes work in terms of what you want an organization or a group to be looking like or having achieved at the end of the year, whether you're doing essential intent work that's saying in a grounded but inspirational way, here's where we'd like to be in a few years, whether you're doing principles work that's like if this team were perfect, this is what it would do or be. Whatever those things are, I think of that as the overarching umbrella intent. And then I think about even/over as what constraints it so that we know how we're going to go after it. So if our essential intent was something around growth, we got to a point where we were like, "Okay, what trade-offs would we actually have to make to do that thing?" And in our case, that trade-off is have hungry people
Aaron Dignan:
Pay for them.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah, pay for it because then we'll be on it. We'll be on our game.
Aaron Dignan:
And take the risk. I think that it's such a good point too about how even/over statements can evolve as you understand yourself better. Because clearly we started with a growth even/over something agenda, and then when it didn't go quite the way we expected, we were like, "Let's get into that a little bit. What's going on there?" And when you scratch a little deeper and a little deeper, you start to realize like, "Oh, okay, for us, what's the driver that's going to get us where we need to go?" And sometimes these things do need to be threaded where it's like, yeah, growth even/over something else, which then daisy chains into talent capacity even/over something else, which then chains into something. So there could be a nested set of statements that's driving you where you need to go, but you just have to take a swing at it and then pay attention and say like, "How are we wiggling out of this?"
Rodney Evans:
Yeah, exactly.
Aaron Dignan:
How we would win.
Rodney Evans:
Exactly. And I think to that point, I find people get a little white-knuckle when I talk about doing trade-offs work because they're like, "I don't want to trade off. I want to have the things and certainly I don't want to..." There are a fair number of leaders I've worked with over the years who are like, "I can't say that we are going to deprioritize something." Or like, "I can't say we're going to make this trade-off." And I'm like, "Well, maybe you can't say it, but it's happening anyway-
Aaron Dignan:
It's necessary.
Rodney Evans:
"... and everybody can see it." And also if you don't trade off something explicitly or intentionally, you're going to trade off a whole bunch of things just willy-nilly. And that doesn't tend to go super, super well. But I do think that a lot of the juice for the squeeze in even/overs is making the concession that you're going to make, being clear about what the time box is, and then really holding yourself as a group to doing it. Because you're not going to learn if you picked wrong and you're not going to learn if you made the wrong assessment about your needs or about your-
Aaron Dignan:
Reality.
Rodney Evans:
... category or about your competitors unless you fully lean into the thing you said you were going to trade off.
Aaron Dignan:
Yeah. And I think counterpoint to the resistance is I do find when some teams that I work with finally get to doing this, there is an enthusiasm and a gleefulness in the leadership to be free to be clear. Because a lot of it has been like, "In order to make everybody happy, I've been playing a game of "yes and..." around everything, keeping it soupy." And then when you're like, "No, no, I need you to say out loud that we prioritize working overtime here because that's the nature of the industry and if you're not really into that, you shouldn't work here." And they're sort of like, "I can say that?" And it's like we can say whatever we want.
Rodney Evans:
It's true.
Aaron Dignan:
We can make agreements about the truth and let's say it out loud, let's consent to it. And then yeah, if people don't want to play that game, they don't have to play that game. And if someone has a good counterpoint, you can hear it out. But the idea of being free to be clear and real again, this surfaces that, and sometimes it's resistant, but sometimes people are like, "Oh, thank God. I can just tell the truth." So here's what I actually want to prioritize. Here's what I actually care about.
Facilitating a team to get good even/overs
Rodney Evans:
Exactly. I think that's exactly right. So if a team were wanting to do some of this work, how would you tell them to facilitate themselves to getting to some good even/overs?
Aaron Dignan:
I think this is one of those things that the perfect process has yet to be invented, but there's a few similar processes floating around online and The Ready's employees, one of them, which is: You get a group together, you have some of those other conversations, whether it's a retrospective or a strategic conversation about essential intent or both or something in between. And then you basically ask the question, what should we prioritize in order to get there, in order to manifest this? And have the group do a lot of generation first. So whether it's on Post-it notes or on a Mural board online or wherever you want to do it, in a Google Doc, we're generating and it's just generate, generate, generate. Allow people to just put the numerator up and not know what the denominator is, because it-
Rodney Evans:
I like that.
Aaron Dignan:
... might be like, "I know we need to prioritize diversity. Not sure what the trade-off is yet. Help me out folks." So get as many numerators as you can on there, get some denominators on there if you can about what's the real trade-off. And then have a discussion to make sure you understand what's on the board. So does anybody see a statement that they don't understand? And I'm always baffled by how many there are where we're like, "Oh wait, what does that mean exactly?" Or the way you phrase that is not super clear, which is a good chance for us to get in the same head space.
And then do some kind of voting democracy elevation of things that seem super relevant, including putting like with like and simplifying where we maybe have some patterns. And then ideally some or a group puts forward a proposal of, "Hey, I think it's these three, or I think it's these four statements that will really guide us for the next X months," and see if you can get consent. And if you can't, then change it, adjust it, do the process of seeking consent like we talked about in the governance episode and get an answer. But it's some flavor of that. It's generation, it's filtering and sorting and compressing and wordsmithing and finding the truth. And then getting everybody to say, "You know what, safe to try, let's go do it."
Rodney Evans:
And if you're doing this in a strategy context where you've done a retro of the last quarter and you're figuring out what the next quarter is going to look like, this can be a really good interstitial before you refresh the projects or your backlog that you're going to do. And I think it's one of the few spots where it doesn't hurt to have a leader potentially weigh in or have some veto power.
Like I was in a really great session with someone who's been on this show who is brilliant and the even/over statement that bubbled up to the top deprioritized growth. And that person was just like, "Yeah, we cannot do that. This quarter, the level of pressure on growth means growth even/over almost anything else, or we're not going to have jobs here." So I think I like having it emerge and be multiplayer and participatory. And particularly in a strategy context, I don't think it hurts if you have a leader who's like, "I have broader context about what might be happening with the board or the parent company or the stock price that is non-negotiable."
Aaron Dignan:
Yeah, I love that. I mean, in a traditional system, the leader has context usually or information that not everyone has or not at the same level. So that's valuable. And even in a more progressive or sort of startup or teal context, often the founder has some kind of sourceness, some vision, some sense of where we're going that is intuitively tuned into something that again, not everybody has full resonance with. And so I think it's okay to be like, "Hey, the reason I created this space or started this party was to manifest something in the world and we need some statements that serve that in some way or it's become something that's not me," which is also... I mean, it could be a big moment actually.
I think these even/over conversations can be transformative for everyone involved, but there are moments where it's like oh, maybe this thing has become something that I don't need to be a part of anymore, or maybe it's becoming that, or maybe it just needed to be reminded of what it was. And that's exactly my role is to be like, "Folks, folks, we started this place to produce the best hamburger, so we're not going to make the shitty one that you want to make. We can't prioritize that." So I think that's the role founders play. And often when you see the Nordstrom family go back, or Howard Schultz go back to Starbucks or Ben & Jerry go back to the factory, it's always in service of like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa."
Rodney Evans:
What happens here?
Aaron Dignan:
"What is natively true about us that we have to draw back to the center?" Because the thing that's weird about even/over statements... Well, it's not weird, it's true across the entire OS, but it's poignant, is that the OS of the world around us is always trying to mess with our priorities. And so if you are a publicly traded company for 20 years and the founder looks away to run their basketball team, there's a very high likelihood that they're going to be like, "Should we switch to one ply toilet paper in the bathrooms?" Then everybody's like, "Yeah, board approved," because that's what the broader culture is telling us to do. So I think there's that role of leader in this that's important.
Using even/overs when all decisions look like the right one
Rodney Evans:
And the one other use case that I wanted to articulate, because I think what we've just outlined in terms of strategy and leader fingerprinted constraining is the most common. But I had a really good experience recently generating even/overs around our hiring process. We've talked about our hiring process on this show before. The thing that I'm the most proud of in terms of our hiring process is that we have developed it in a truly emergent way. We have truly held assertions and assumptions lightly and tested and used real data and real experimentation as we go. And very recently we had gotten through interviewing with a bunch of candidates and a bunch of candidates had made it through the application process, through three rounds of interviews, and we had to make some decisions. And it was very murky. You were in some of those conversations. It was very murky.
What you started to hear was people defaulting to preference or opinion or trying to conjure data to make their case, or more specifically to just be like, "I don't actually feel that strongly about this, so someone else make their case." I'm giving you all that context because sometimes when you're in a meeting or you're in a discussion and the decision is not becoming clear and everyone is making points that seem rational and valid, what might be happening is that you need an even/over statement. And what Sharon and I came away with after that was, oh, we have coalesced around the skills that we are looking for, but if a bunch of people have tested over the threshold for those skills, we don't have a way then to prioritize between those people.
And so she and I created a list of even/overs for the people that we hire, and we actually didn't ask for consent around these because we're the stewards of this process. And we just said, this is what we're going to try for now, and we're going to see if the people that we hire using these even/overs are a bunch of yahoos. And if they are, then we'll change them. But for anybody who wants to come work at The Ready, what we landed on was versatility even/over depth, which addressed some conversation about people being like, "This person is an expert in growth." And we were like, "Who? What? That's not what we're hiring for." The even/over ready to deploy even/over loads of potential because we talked to some diamonds that people were just like, "They could be great." And I'm like, "No fixer uppers." So we came to that one. Generative difference even/over existing perspective. So more divergence, less sameness.
And finally, and potentially most controversially given our history, if we are going to choose to develop someone that is not ready to hit the ground running day one, our even/over is to develop those with relational strength even/over developing those with intellectual horsepower. And of course, we want both. Everybody wants both empathy and candle power. And what we have decided in this moment is if we're going to invest in somebody who is not ready to deploy, we are going to prioritize that and see where that gets us. And so I only say this and give these really concrete examples because we didn't start our hiring process with these even/overs. We're a year in and we've only now realized that after we get through this minimal threshold of coherence, there was still a missing rubric through which to prioritize our decisions.
Aaron Dignan:
And I think that speaks to the kind of turtles all the way down aspect of it too, which is like you could have these and then filter even further with another set of four. It's how big is the funnel and how deep do we want to specify? And I think everything in org design, it's just enough. So just enough clarity, just enough direction, just enough alignment to keep us coherent so that we can maintain our flexibility and our freedom and our autonomy, but have a togetherness about it all.
Good even/overs can be counter-intuitive
Aaron Dignan:
I think the last bit of territory to hit before we close on this first conversation about even/overs is the counterintuitive nature of a really good one. So we talked about rule number one is it should work both ways. It should be a positive thing and another positive thing and make sense that way. I think the rule number two for me is if and when you can, having the statement be something that most of your competition or most of your peers in a space would not recognize as true and important but turns out to be, is actually where the rubber meets the road on these things becoming super impressive and powerful. And so for a lot of companies, they probably wouldn't have gone completely insane about market share as Amazon did for as long as they did without profit in the public market and survived that.
A lot of companies in the hospitality space when Airbnb first came out were like, "Hospitality even/over feeling like a local is definitely the strategy." And Airbnb was like, "No, feeling connected, feeling authentic and local even/over hospitality, we don't even have a fresh towel for you." And it turned out that to the tune of many billions of dollars a year, they were right. And so that I think is the real magic of this, is first just make your priorities clear, make real trade-offs, make them interesting to you. And then second, look at how many of the statements we hold at a company level or a unit level or a product level are controversial. And if you have none that are controversial, think about what that means because it really means that strategically you're playing a pretty safe game and you're very unlikely to have an outsized outcome.
Rodney Evans:
And this is a perfect way to where you have the sense or where you have the one divergent wild idea that everybody is kind of jazzed about. This is a place to articulate that wild swing for a period of time and see what it gets you if you prioritize the thing nobody else is looking at.
Aaron Dignan:
Yeah, exactly. And I think you can play that game of when you have the spark of an idea, just try to put it in these terms. So you say like, "Oh, I have an idea for a new restaurant. It's going to be so amazing because it's going to do X and Y and Z," and whatever. Cool. What are you really saying? What are you actually prioritizing even/over something that the rest of the industry already does? And if you can put it in those terms clearly day one, the power of that idea, then for others to come along for the ride and be like, "Oh, we don't just serve an extra portion because we serve an extra portion, we serve it for a reason. And we have a whole psychology around why that's the trade-off we want to make and why others will be unwilling to make it and why we're uniquely suited to make it and are going to achieve our purpose as a result."
Rodney Evans:
And those things when you see them in the wild, and I would love to hear from people when they have seen those things in the wild. I will try to come up with some more examples myself, but I feel like as a customer, those are the things that will delight you. When you just have an experience with a company or a product and nobody else is doing it and you're just like, "Ooh, good for you. That's sparkly. That feels like fresh and brand new." I think a lot of those come from counterintuitive trade-offs that organizations have decided to make.
Aaron Dignan:
Customer delight seems like a pretty good place to draw things to a close. And it's occurring to me that we don't have explicit even/over statements for the Brave New Work Podcast.
Rodney Evans:
We should make some.
Aaron Dignan:
And so it might be fun to come up with some and put them in the show notes.
Rodney Evans:
Okay.
Aaron Dignan:
So that's what I'm thinking. And then we'll see what listeners have to say about that.
Rodney Evans:
I've already got four in my brain.
Aaron Dignan:
Bam, you're good at this.
Rodney Evans:
I'm ready to do it. All right y'all, if you are liking what you're hearing, please do give us a review. Tell us about your even/over statements. Send us a note to podcast [at] theready [dot] com. We love it. Please also share us far and wide. We appreciate it so much.
Aaron Dignan:
If you could see me right now, you would see that I'm tipping my virtual hat to Taylor Marvin for making us sound good every week. Brave New Work is produced by The Ready, where we help organizations around the world change the way they work, look into it. And you can get in touch with us by emailing podcast [at] theready [dot] com. As for you, thanks for listening. Now go change something.