Crafting rituals to shift cultures: Part 2
Our last post described how we set about helping the council teams taking part in our #CouncilCulture collaborative innovation project to develop rituals designed to help embed the narrative shifts they want to make. These rituals serve as regular moments of collective attention around the team’s intention, helping to resist the pull of business-as-usual.
What the councils came up with
“There was so much in the last event that we came away with — from thinking about rooms and spaces where we meet our residents and what this was like for them (ceremonial and bureaucratic), to names of roles and teams (hierarchy), to rituals we can develop with our own teams.”
Each council team chose a different ritual to test, based on nine sample rituals we’d shared:
- “Weekly Wall of Inspiration”: One council chose to print out any inspiring examples they came across of local citizen action or interesting innovations by other local governments around the world, and pin them on a wall in a shared space. They would then gather for a regular coffee and cake meet-up, where each person talks through the examples they’ve pinned. The print-outs are then removed from the wall and the cycle starts again, ensuring a constant heartbeat of inspiration.
- “Touchstone”: Another team focused on implementing a “touchstone” ritual within a specific project group. Touchstone rituals involve everyone tapping or touching an object to refocus attention on a shared goal before a key moment — imagine athletes touching a motivational sign as they leave a locker room and take the field. For this team, the touchstone involved taking a few minutes at the start of each project group meeting to tell a personal story about an individual who might use the service being designed.
- “Citizens Can…”: The last team chose to start their team meetings by taking turns to complete the sentence “Citizens Can…” for two minutes. This warm-up exercise is designed to constantly remind council teams that residents are capable, active citizens who can play a role in solving shared problems. The team adapted this for their stand-up meetings, using it to bring residents’ perspectives and needs into the conversation.
In each case, the council staff attending the workshop deliberately left the design of the ritual unfinished, to allow their colleagues back at the office to finalise the details themselves and therefore feel more ownership of the ritual.
This last team also set out to trial a second ritual, “Researcher-in-Residence”, in which team members would take turns spending a week or a fortnight researching and collating inspiring examples of citizen-led innovation by other local governments and similar organisations, before sharing them in a “show-and-tell” meetup (with coffee and cake, of course). The participants added to this idea by creating the idea of a physical scrapbook that would be passed from colleague to colleague. As we’ll see below, however, this ran into a practical issue.
How it worked in practice
“I was ready for it to be uncomfortable. You have to keep quiet and let it sit… but many people really got it right away, and bought into it.”
Over the following months, we reconvened virtually to check how the rituals were going down with the wider teams. From this, we gleaned five main takeaways:
- Rituals have an impact: Colleagues noticed a difference in how their meetings played out following the introduction of an attention-focusing ritual. Several people felt a deeper personal connection to the meeting topics, and more readily incorporated a sense of citizens’ needs and perspectives into their discussions. In this regard, the rituals were successful in breaking the bubble of “business as usual”.
- Don’t be afraid: All of the rituals were generally well-accepted when introduced, with no team receiving significant pushback or disinterest from colleagues. This was true of colleagues from across different roles, with some even volunteering to lead the ritual in the future.
- Leave room to adapt: As we expected, it was helpful to leave room for the ritual to be adapted and finalised by the wider team who will be performing it — this encouraged “buy-in” and meant teams got more out of it.
- Be ready for the novelty to wear off: Workplace rituals definitely benefit from having “champions” who will make sure they keep happening, especially when under-pressure teams might not be in the mood. In some cases, the ritual was quietly dropped by teams if the person who first introduced it was not there.
- Rituals can be powerful: The “touchstone ritual”, in which team members shared fictitious stories about imagined service users to help ground the meeting in real personal connection, triggered such an emotional reaction in some attendees that they asked for the ritual to be dialled back in future meetings. And the “weekly wall of inspiration” was sometimes so inspiring that it took up half the meeting! Constantly calibrating and tweaking the ritual, while still keeping its core spirit and intention intact, is key.
In summary, our participants’ experiences suggest that workplace rituals could indeed become powerful tools for culture change by refocusing attention on key values and goals, but it’s important to experiment with different rituals to find what works best for your team. We’re not claiming that any of the rituals led to overnight transformation, but they clearly have potential to break from the norm and reorient attention on the underlying narrative shift.
Workplace rituals in a virtual world
We probably didn’t account enough during the workshop for the impact of virtual meetings. One team shelved their idea for running a second “Researcher-in-Residence” ritual because it would have been impossible to physically pass the scrapbook from person to person, and the scrapbook was felt to be an important element.
The “Touchstone” team, meanwhile, had to tweak their ritual for the online space by changing the touchstone from being something that would be physically touched to being an image and a story shared at the start of a Teams meeting.
The “Weekly Wall of Inspiration” was also adapted to accommodate a virtual component. While the team still planned to discuss ideas in person rather than via Teams, it decided to collect and display the ideas on the homepage of their Sharepoint site. This way, the inspirational ideas would be visible and accessible to everyone on the team, creating a lasting source of motivation. The team felt this evolution aligned with the spirit of co-creation, while still providing the intended value of the original ritual. In fact, they later placed the ideas onto a more widely accessible Sharepoint, sharing them with the whole council.
Further questions to explore
As the participating councils continue to embed and experiment with their rituals, we’re continuing to ponder a few questions:
- How can rituals best be spread and adapted across different teams within an organisation? In some cases, it may be best to take a single ritual and encourage other teams to adopt it, so that its power spreads across the organisation; in other cases, it may be better for each team to come up with its own set of rituals unique to their own responsibilities and “micro-culture”.
- Relatedly, how can workplace rituals be integrated into different levels of an organisation, from strategic to operational? Some teams had colleagues in operational roles happily joining in their rituals, which was encouraging. However, we’re conscious that there is a bias among our cohort towards more strategic roles (note that all of the rituals involve meetings), which makes us think there is further exploration to be had in creating and testing rituals in diverse workplace settings.
- What is the best way of introducing and describing rituals to a team? Ensuring that there’s space for teams to adapt new rituals and make them their own was clearly important, which leads us to think that ideally all team members would be involved in co-creating the ritual from the start. Also, one team member felt strongly that the word “ritual” was inappropriate for a work or team setting, given its religious and cultural connotations. While this was an isolated case, it should be noted that ritual experts Ozenc & Hagan warn against explicitly using the term when co-creating rituals with teams, so it’s definitely worth considering the language you use.
Finally, it’s worth a reminder that our definition of “rituals” within the “narrative, rituals, totems” culture change framework extends beyond the types of attention-focusing group activities described above to cover all of the “furniture” of organisational life, such as job titles, KPIs, symbolic events, how meeting rooms are named and decorated, and so on. Our hope is that the type of active group rituals we’ve been trialling can open up space to notice, discuss and change the more passive or subconscious rituals that surround us everyday.
