#152 - Getting clarity when pursuing multiple, contradictory goals
Make your trade-offs explicit with the "even more" strategy
One year, at our annual offsite, the company leadership shared the mantra for the year: the Genius of the AND.
It is a concept from Jim Collins’ Built to Last. Collins writes:
Builders of greatness reject the "Tyranny of the OR" and embrace the "Genius of the AND. They embrace both extremes across a number of dimensions at the same time…
Some examples:
👉Quality AND productivity
👉Core business growth AND new category expansion
👉Margin AND market share
And at a higher level:
offense AND defense, purpose AND profit, autonomy AND accountability, deliberation AND action.
When conflicts arise between things you want—and they arise all the time in business and life—it is important to have tiebreakers. Without tiebreakers, it becomes impossible to seriously pursue goals, in the same sweep, that are at odds with each other.
One tiebreaker strategy, and there are a few of them, is creating “even over” statements. It is something I learned about in Aaron Dignan’s Brave New Work; the breadcrumbs for the idea go back to entrepreneur Tom Thomison. I’ve boiled it down to a simple protocol.
1️⃣Write a priority (or a core value) for your org (or team) on the right.
2️⃣To its left, write down something that is more important.
3️⃣Trade off the two priorities by adding “even over” between them.
You cannot go wrong with this. What matters (more than what else) depends entirely on what you think is best for your business or team.
For example, you may write,
✔User growth even over unit economics (makes sense if your product has found PMF and is in the early growth stage)
Or, you may write,
✔Unit economics even over user growth (if you have successfully monetized your product, having grown and scaled, and are now in the gravy train phase)
Go through with this exercise and you’ll end up with a series of statements that are true for your organization and that will make trade-offs explicit during confusion.
So what about the Genius of the AND? Is it flawed? I think it may be misunderstood and hence mis-applied. There’s a context within which it makes sense. The Genius of the AND helps us break out of narrow choices—the Tyranny of the OR.
I remember thinking about it when I was studying how a young Issy Sharp in the 1960s came up with the revolutionary idea of building a hotel chain that was different from anything else in the market. Sharp felt tied down by the choice every hotelier around him was making: basic motel or downtown convention hotel. So he joined the seemingly contradictory goals of conveniences and a personal touch in hospitality by creating a chain of medium-sized luxury hotels that married the best amenities with personalized service.
The genius of this brand of integrative thinking came to be the Four Seasons chain of hotels.
A strategy that ignores trade-offs breaks quickly down the ranks. Confused frontline teams, overburdened leaders, and a lot of what I call case-by-case thinking. Integrative thinking or the Genius of the AND is effective but people may mistake it for A + B. It is not. It is creating a third option C that combines salient elements of both A and B but is different from each. It is a kind of creative solutioning.
My firm’s Genius-of-the-AND ask was quality AND productivity. In hindsight, we could have used the opportunity to rethink the definition of quality. We used to calculate a certain metric as the quality North Star. Did that matter to our customers? Was there something else that was a truer indicator of value to customers? That confusion could have been an opportunity to explore, much like Issy Sharp understood that business travelers longed for the familiarity of home along with the most modern conveniences.
What are your observations about when the Genius of the AND makes sense and when an “even over” strategy wins? When should we make trade-offs and pick a side and when should we reject uncomfortable trade-offs and look for creative solutions?
👋Hi, I’m Satyajit. Wecome to my newsletter. Here I study human behavior with the goal of unpacking the patterns of thought underneath it for a better career and a better life.