Crafting rituals to shift cultures: Part 1

Local councils often find themselves in transactional, even paternalistic relationships with their residents. How can we shift the day-to-day culture in local government to make room for more open, collaborative, citizen-focused interactions? That’s the core question explored in our Collaborative Innovation project with teams from Westmorland & Furness, South Gloucestershire and Waltham Forest (see here for our introductory blog post).

In our last post, we shared what we’d learned about the power of narrative: creating simple, honest stories that express the shifts an organisation or team wants to make in natural and colloquial language. These narratives provide a foundation for the envisioned culture change. Our second workshop focused on rituals: everyday practices that can help those new narratives take root.

We met on a bright March day at Good Shepherd Studios, a wonderful community space in Leytonstone, Waltham Forest. Our goal was to develop new rituals that each participating council could introduce for a core team of 8–12 people to experiment with.

What are rituals?

Rituals are the seemingly mundane routines, practices, and symbols that carry hidden power within an organisation. We see them in how teams meet, how organisations measure success, the job titles we use, and even how our workplaces are decorated. Don’t be fooled by the seemingly trivial nature of rituals. Often, they become so ingrained that we barely notice their influence, but they subtly shape our understanding of our organisations’ work and values, including our horizons of what’s possible.

That’s why we believe that focusing on rituals is vital for understanding and transforming organisational culture. It’s about “sweating the small stuff” to uncover the hidden power within the everyday practices, processes and paraphernalia that make up a workplace culture. By doing this, we can then craft new rituals that will intervene in that culture — pushing it away from the paternalistic and the transactional, and towards an approach that recognises what citizens are capable of and seeks to facilitate and enable them.

Understanding rituals

We started by exploring some of the theory behind our concept of rituals. Drawing on the work of Casper ter Kuile and Kursat Ozenc & Margaret Hagan, we developed a simple model and a series of tailored examples to inspire our cohort.

At the basic level, we shared with participants ter Kuile’s idea that the key ingredients of a ritual are:

Intention + Attention + Repetition

As ter Kuile explains:

“We create rituals by starting with things you are already doing. By simply tuning into our intention changes our approach and our experience. Once we have intention, pay attention — be present to the activity. Finally, repeat. By creating this ritual loop in our life — intention, attention, repetition — we start to add more meaning and purpose to our life.”

Now, we at New Citizen Project tend to define rituals a bit more widely, in the sense that we believe an organisation’s existing rituals often have important subconscious effects in shaping assumptions and behaviours. This means that we would consider even our unthinking habits, as well as the ambient “furniture” of organisational life, to have ritual power (and therefore be worth paying attention to), whereas ter Kuile explicitly distinguishes between ritual and habit.

However, when it comes to proactively designing a ritual to intervene effectively in your culture, we see a lot of value in ter Kuile’s focus on attention — in particular, by creating regular moments of collective attention that break through business-as-usual and generate and maintain momentum towards your desired shift. It’s a bit like when a bobsleigh team starts with an intense collective sprint to get the bobsleigh moving, before gravity begins to do its work.

What rituals do

To get the ball rolling, we created nine sample rituals that embody this formula of “intention + attention + repetition”.

Image caption: “Weekly Wall of Inspiration”: one of our nine example rituals.

In creating these sample rituals, we drew on elements of Ozenc & Hagen’s excellent Rituals at Work. Their practical guide helpfully breaks down workplace rituals into different functional categories, such as improving “performance and flow” or fostering community and team building. Drawing on our decade of experience in designing participatory strategies, we adapted these categories to include sample rituals for regularly refocusing on the desired narrative shift; building belief and confidence in new ways of working; and for creating space for creative thinking about how to involve citizens.

Ozenc & Hagan also stress that rituals must have a certain “je ne sais quoi” quality to make them stick. Their extensive research suggests that this is best achieved by incorporating movement into rituals, using props, or sharing food and drink, among other factors. At the same time, we introduced participants to the Wundt Novelty Curve: encouraging them to make sure that their rituals would be novel enough to be attractive and interesting, but not so strange and disruptive as to put people off taking part.

Image caption: Group discussions before the winner was crowned.

We invited participants to discuss and compare the sample rituals through an interactive board game. Participants shared what they liked and disliked about the sample rituals, imagined how they might work (or not work!) at their own workplaces, rated their favourites, and suggested tweaks and improvements.

Crafting rituals

We created a simple “canvas” to help participants design their rituals. This included:

• the “From/To” shift that the ritual is intended to embed
• a simple description of the ritual
• a “hook” around which the ritual is based (e.g. a regular meeting)
• what makes the ritual special (e.g. movement, props)

For inspiration, participants drew on the sample rituals we’d shared earlier, while also bearing in mind ter Kuile’s suggestion that rituals can be created from the everyday practices that you are already doing.

Image caption: our Ritual Design Canvas

We were also conscious that, while each council had two or three participants attending the rituals workshop, the resulting rituals were to be tested by 8–12 people within their wider teams. We knew from Ozenc & Hagan’s work that it was important for the people experimenting with the ritual to feel ownership of it, so we encouraged participants to design in a bit of flexibility and bring back an “80–90% complete” ritual that their teams could adapt and finalise.

What happened next?

In our next post, we describe the rituals our participating councils came up with during the workshop, how they “landed” in real life, and how they were adapted by the wider teams that tested them.