Every leadership team eventually hits the same wall: two good things, not enough time, money, or people to do both well. The instinct is to avoid saying so. You add the new initiative without retiring the old one. You promise the board both stability and innovation. You tell faculty that retention and new hiring are both top priorities this year, without ever naming which one wins when they collide.
The avoidance feels kind. It isn't free. Left unresolved, it shows up as slower decisions, because nobody has permission to choose. It shows up as credibility loss, when a head says everything matters and the team quietly concludes nothing does. It shows up as drift in culture and identity, as the school tries to be all things and becomes recognizable as none. It shows up as fatigue in your best people, who are asked to hold two competing standards at once. And it shows up in the board room, when the head and the board have never actually agreed on what the institution is optimizing for.
The tradeoff itself isn't the problem. The silence around it is.
The practice comes from Karina Mangu-Ward's work at August, developed in her book Teams That Meet the Moment. The structure is simple: name two things you genuinely value, and state which one wins when they conflict.
Faculty compensation growth, even over expanding new academic programs. Retaining institutional memory, even over hiring for fresh perspective. Protecting instructional time, even over adding new all-school programming.
Notice what an Even Over is not. It is not "A over B" as in B doesn't matter — that's just a priority list, and priority lists are how schools end up with eleven priorities. An Even Over insists both things are real values, worth real investment, held by reasonable people on your team. It only resolves the question of what happens when they collide. At times they won't collide, and you'll get to do both. The Even Over exists for the times they do.
That distinction is what removes the stigma. Choosing B doesn't mean you devalued A. It means you did the thing your team already agreed to do, in a moment your team already anticipated.
Imagine a school leadership team spending a fall weighing, budget cycle after budget cycle, whether to fund a new STEM lab, raise faculty salaries, or hold tuition flat for affordability. Every conversation returned to the same three options, because no one had ever said out loud which of these the institution was actually built to protect first. The team finally sat down and wrote: Faculty compensation, even over new capital projects, even over affordability initiatives. It took one afternoon and the team was very clear on their thinking of why they arrived at this place. It saved months of revisiting the same question and gave the head language to use with the board that made the team’s thinking transparent.
Even Overs work best as a small, durable set — two to three statements a leadership team can actually hold in their heads, not a policy document. They're built from real recent decisions, not abstract values exercises. And they're revisited on a cadence — annually, or when circumstances genuinely shift — because an Even Over that was right two years ago (protect the endowment, even over facilities investment) may be exactly wrong today. The point isn't to get it permanently right. It's to have something explicit enough to return to, so the next hard call doesn't start from zero.
Use this with your leadership team in a single 60–90 minute session. Come with real recent decisions in hand, not hypotheticals.
1. Surface the pattern.
2. Draft candidates individually.
3. Compare and stress-test.
4. Check for false comfort.
5. Commit and communicate.
6. Set a revisit date.
A closing note for facilitators: the goal of the session isn't consensus on every word. It's getting the team comfortable saying, out loud, that something they value will sometimes lose and that this is a decision, not a failure.