The Nature of Trade Offs

The world is not just both and when it comes to production of anything or it comes to outcome of anything, there are always constraints. 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.

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Prior 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 of Brave New Work, 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)

Read our article on even/overs on Medium.

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