Twice a year, we bring everyone together for an all-company summit.
We have a primary and secondary goal for the event. Here’s what we’ve learned about not mixing the two 👇
The primary goal of our summit is clear:
To align everyone around Fellow’s goals, vision, and future direction.
We need to make sure we’re all moving in the same direction and that our teams are excited about that future.
But there’s also a secondary goal:
Getting everyone together to socialize, have fun, and build stronger connections.
When we looked at the feedback for our last event, it was very diverse. But a lot of the feedback was targeted at making the event even more social and bonding focused.
At first our tendency was to apply ALL of the feedback.
But then we noticed that we’d be designing a completely different type of event.
And at that moment, I was reminded of the “Objective Drift Fallacy”:
When your secondary goal starts overshadowing your primary goal.
We 100% value all of the feedback we get.
At the same time, we need to take the feedback into consideration while taking into account the priorities we have for the event:
Primary goal: Alignment & excitement about the future
Secondary goal: Connection / Social bonding
If these priorities were reversed, and our primary goal was connection & social bonding, then our event would look very different.
By being very clear on the order of the priorities, we’re able to optimize the event so most of the effort is spent on ensuring everyone walks away aligned and excited about the future.
And at the same time, we can have enough connection building and social events so that everyone forms stronger bonds.
That’s the order of priority for us at Fellow, for this event.
For a different event, the order might be different.
It’s really important to ask:
1) What are the goals?
2) What is the relative priority of those goals?
By staying focused on what matters, you can optimize for the outcomes that you want the most.
Start by being super clear on the goals, and most importantly, prioritize those goals relative to each other.
