Mindfully designing work and life
How to apply a ritual design strategy
Your life is full of ritual. Your work as well, probably. We all have some immediate ideas that come to mind when we hear the word. However, if you unpack the notion of ritual, you may discover new ways of seeing and engaging the world — new ways of mindfully designing your work and life.
This happened to me when I pursued a doctorate in anthropology on ritual design while working at Air New Zealand. For my research, I applied insights from ritual scholarship to the workplace in support of a new collaboration strategy. This was important to me because, perhaps like you, I believe in humanistic organisations. By this I mean organisations conceived as communities of neighbours (sometimes global neighbours) working together for the mutual benefit of all stakeholders and our planet, and where daily work is an expression of one’s values. A collaborative culture is one key characteristic of a humanistic organisational culture.
At Air New Zealand, the golden rule (treat others as you want to be treated) was explicitly discussed as a core value among team members that supported collaboration. We designed rhythms and work rituals to embed these values and principles into our practices. This synergy between ritual design and collaborative culture felt so powerful that I decided to integrate work and study by creating a ritual design strategy that supports change leadership and cultural change. I am now leveraging these insights in my current role at Xero, and thought I might share how you can use ritual design to support your own work and personal aspirations.
A ritual design strategy intends to embed our values into our behaviours — at work, at home and in the community.
What is a ritual?
While a routine is something you do regularly, a ritual is something you do mindfully because it brings your values to life. Rituals embed intentions and values into behaviours — that is what rituals aspire to be. You can try on this definition right now by asking yourself:
In what ways do my rituals weave my best intentions and values into my life?
You will probably find quite a number of rituals in your workplace and your personal life. In my work, key rituals include team meetings, co-design sessions, one-on-ones, demos, coaching and mentoring sessions. You may also have other rituals, like retrospectives, investor briefing, sales interactions, performance reviews and more.
If you want your daily behaviours to express your values, then you can design your rituals accordingly. That is what ritual design means and does. How exactly do you do that? By clarifying your goals and values, weaving them into your narrative, and designing rituals to reinforce and enact your narrative.
1. Clarify your goals and values
Select one of your goals and identify the values you hold that underpin this goal. Ask yourself: why does this matter to me? This may touch on some extremely personal issues, but it’s so important. Which values do you feel are essential to your self-perception and which feel more aspirational?
Helpful hint: For many of us, when we first start capturing our thoughts, it can feel like someone is looking over our shoulder — maybe someone we are trying to impress. Exorcise them. Thinking and writing without self-deception is a ritual in itself. Be fearless!
2. Write your narrative
Next, weave your goal and values into a summary of who you are, what you want, what is important to you, and why. This could be just one paragraph or many pages long, whatever suits you. And, just as a reminder: no baloney, no spin, no marketing. The raw truth.
Narratives are stories we use to make sense of the world. Perhaps you have family stories and ones about yourself that you share regularly to communicate who you are. Similarly, nations, cultures and religions have core narratives. These often include origin myths that explain the birth of the community or the universe.
Why this focus on narratives? Because rituals are cultural strategies for embedding and reinforcing narratives.
Our lives are shaped by these stories we tell and retell — to ourselves and about ourselves. We might not say these out loud or even consciously acknowledge them, but they are ‘in there’ and influence how we engage our environment. Core narratives also sit at the cultural centre of organisations and teams. There may be some differences between official narratives, and those active in our minds. For example, you may not agree with all aspects of a key family myth.
Writing out your narrative accomplishes several things. It clarifies your own beliefs and motivations, and it provides a written record that’s useful for collaborating with colleagues on the strategy, and designing change-related communications and learning-related activities.
For example, here is a narrative that captures beliefs and values related to coaching:
“I believe in the power of coaching to help people thrive and I am committed to helping organisations embed coaching strategies and behaviours. I believe coaching fosters collaboration and humanism while also supporting a thriving organisation. A great coaching strategy is underpinned by values that I share and that are important to me, including empathy, contribution, reflective practice, learning, growth, continual improvement and authenticity.
I conceive coaching as a form of collaboration, grounded in dialogue and trust, where a key goal is to illuminate the intersection between the coachee’s and the organisation’s goals and aspirations, particularly regarding capability development. Coaching sessions are one part of a great coaching strategy. The others include ongoing capability building in coaching, and rituals of reflection whereby the coachee applies the insights and decisions derived through coaching to their daily activities. Coaching thereby becomes a strategy for weaving reflective practice and continual improvement into life and work.
It feels good and right to regularly reflect on what I’m doing, how it’s going, what I hope for, and what I might adjust to achieve desired outcomes — both for the organisation and for my own career and growth. I feel inspired to view work as practice. I feel supported, valued, engaged.”
Ritual and myth
This is fascinating — for a geek like me, anyway. Perhaps you are familiar with Joseph Campbell? His conversations with Bill Moyers (The Power of Myth, 1989) are inspirational lessons. If you haven’t yet seen them, you’re in for a treat. Campbell defines a ritual as the enactment of a myth, where myths are (in stark contrast to popular definitions of myth) cultural narratives containing essential truths about our beliefs and values.
A simple example illustrating this connection between ritual and mythic narrative is a birthday celebration during which the mother retells the birth story (re-enactment might be a bit much). Religious examples include the Catholic Communion which re-enacts aspects of the last supper, and the Jewish Passover Seder, a ritual meal that retells the story of Moses delivering his people from slavery.
3. Design your ritual to reinforce, retell and enact your narrative
Having unpacked your goals and values and crafted your narrative, the next step is to design (or revise) your ritual to embed and reinforce the substance of those ideas into specific activities, tools and behaviours.
To design a ritual, create an activity that retells or re-enacts the narrative you are wanting to reinforce.
Ritual design is a creative process with no algorithm. However, ritual scholarship has identified ‘family characteristics’ of ritual — common aspects that contribute to their power — and these can serve as design considerations when creating your own rituals. Your narrative is the key design element, while these characteristics can strengthen the reinforcement. Step through these and consider how they might support your intentions.
- Invariance. How might your ritual be served by various kinds of consistency? For example, consistent frequency, sequence of activities, time and space.
- Symbol. How might your intentions be represented in words, sounds, images, objects, props, food, clothing, the physical space and other materials you might use during the event?
- Rule governance. How might your ritual clarify and ensure expectations for the participants? Ritual is often the opposite of ‘anything goes’ because you have particular intentions.
- Traditionalism. How might your ritual reinforce traditional narratives or perhaps modify tradition? Rituals sometimes feel legitimate because they draw upon traditions that are already understood. In organisations, traditionalism sometimes includes retelling ‘origin stories’ of the organisation, team or strategy.
- Performance. How might your ritual embody and perform your goals, values and intentions in the behaviour of participants? Consider agenda, physical arrangements, designated movements, changes in position, and engaging ritual objects. All sensory capabilities are available for symbol and experience design.
- Formalism. Each of the above elements contribute to the formal feel of ritual. Ritual feels formal and formality feels ritualistic. How might your ritual be formalised using the above design characteristics to maximise the power of your ritual?
By conceiving an event that reinforces your narrative, and creatively leveraging the above design considerations, you are ready to prototype your ritual. From there, you iterate as desired. A good ritual feels right while embedding your values and intentions into specific behaviours. However, where colleagues and family members are participants or co-designers, you should expect that some ideas may not feel right to everyone. A ritual that feels perfect to you might feel awkward and embarrassing to others. The basic solution is to design rituals collaboratively with participants.
Collaborative ritual design
One of the most powerful things you can do with family, teams, colleagues and collaborators is to design your rituals together. Consider your existing rituals as a team: what are they, how well are they serving you, and what might you do differently? Occasionally, this may strike some participants as strange. Product design and service design professionals have been talking about rituals for years so this conversation is natural in these environments, including at Xero.
The future of ritual design includes refining the ways organisations leverage ritual design as a core leadership competency and key collaborative activity. Indeed, this was a key insight from my research.
Ritual design is a basic competency for organisational leaders.
For example, how might you design an initial coaching session that enacts the narrative, leverages ritual design characteristics, and is designed collaboratively? Remember, you’re not designing the coaching method (perhaps using GROW in this instance), but designing the ritual.
The first session can be conceived as an ‘origin event’ during which the coach and coachee share their respective coaching narratives. Sharing narratives serves several purposes, including establishing rapport, sharing what is important to each other, asking clarifying questions and setting a tone for subsequent sessions. The tone should express core values of trust and transparency.
You would then need to ensure upcoming coaching sessions embed the values and intentions you’ve just shared. First, open and close each coaching session with consistent and reinforcing reminders: short summaries of why you’re here that retell your narratives. Secondly, consider a session that is set apart — in time, place, tone, and activity — from more typical workplace contexts.
Do you prefer casual spaces versus meeting rooms, walking versus sitting, unicycle riding? Is there a park nearby? Discuss artefacts to be uniquely used during coaching. This might include a special object that represents the coachee’s values and intentions. The idea of symbols makes perfect sense to some people, while others find it odd. In short, explicitly discuss and engage in collaborative ritual design!
Creating rituals at home
At home is where your own explorations and experimentations with ritual design might yield great things, particularly with partners and families, but individually as well. Danielle (my partner) and I design rituals for ourselves that, while based on traditional rituals, are re-designed to be authentic to our personal context.
Our weekly sabbath ritual, which is far from traditional, includes acknowledging our values and intentions and questioning how well we are living these. This ritual includes a consistent sequence, and words and props reserved for this purpose including candles, bells, a quaich (ritual cup) and wine.
Some people might say that such a ritual is not necessary — that such basic communication should simply be woven seamlessly into daily life. Absolutely. Ritual design is one way to accomplish this goal. Some other rituals in my life include a form of journaling, composing and playing music, and touching a mezuzah as we leave and enter our home. Some of our holidays are ritualised, as I suspect they are in your family; these are opportunities to adapt traditional practices.
Rituals ensure we take the time to do what we believe is right — they make it easier to do the right thing.
There are workplace equivalents to these personal rituals of reflection. At Xero (perhaps at your workplace, too) we engage in periodic retros and health checks to assess how well teams are living their values and intentions. These are quite obvious methods for reflection and continual improvement. Formalising these processes into rituals is a form of performance assurance — a way of ensuring that reflective practice is woven into our rhythms of work.
Ritual design is not just for rituals
A ritual design strategy can be used to design anything — not just rituals. At Air New Zealand, I used ritual thinking to design activities such as co-design sessions and union-management summits, and tools such as facilitator guides and a digital playbook for building organisational capability in collaborative problem solving. Tools are designed to operationalise their intentions, just like rituals, therefore, many tools can be usefully conceived as ritual objects.
Essentially, anything you do or create can be approached through the lens of ritual design, as this approach is rooted in design anthropology, human-centred design (like design thinking) and scholarship related to the strategies employed by cultures and religions.
Yes, it is hard to talk about ritual without mentioning religion — and there is no need to avoid the subject. Before exploring design anthropology, I studied the phenomenon of religion, which is where I was first exposed to ritual as a cultural strategy. Ritual and religion are intimately connected; religions are cultural systems that operationalise community norms while rituals embed these norms into behaviours. Therefore, for some religious adherents, daily life is highly ritualised; there is a prescribed way to do almost everything.
Organisations of all kinds, including large commercial entities, are also communities that have cultures, norms, narratives, values and rituals. It is rather obvious, when seen this way, that organisations ought to take their rituals seriously — and design their rituals mindfully.
Is there evidence that rituals work? Yes, studies suggest that rituals achieve a variety of outcomes, including: providing meaning, managing anxiety, reinforcing the social order, communicating important values, enhancing group solidarity, including and excluding (not necessarily a good thing!), signaling commitment, managing work structure and prescribing and reinforcing significant events.
For a summary of studies, see: Hobson, N. M., Schroeder, J., Risen, J. L., Xygalatas, D., & Inzlicht, M. (2018). The Psychology of Rituals: An Integrative Review and Process-Based Framework. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 22(3), 260–284.
Living the life you want to live
Rituals are a way of making sense of the world and can influence how you see and engage with the world. They are part of the strategic toolkit that evolved with our species, and can help you live the life you want to live. The mission of a ritual design strategy is to continually improve the ways in which your goals, values, aspirations and best intentions (of your team, family, organisation or community) are woven into the fabric of your routine behaviours.
In my current work at Xero, I’m focused on using rituals to weave reflective practice and continual improvement into teams and strategies. I suspect we all want our behaviours to express our values, but that is not always easy. When life gets very busy (and sometimes crazy, like 2020 in general) it is easy to slip into less mindful living — to just get through things. Sometimes that does not include behaving in alignment with what we really wish for ourselves.
Ritual design can be a strategic remedy for this — a way to increase mindful living and working. So enjoy collaboratively designing your rituals with family and colleagues. I would love to hear your ritual design narrative!
Want to know more? I recommend these reads:
- Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions, Christine Bell, Oxford University Press, 1997.
- Religion is Not About God, Loyal Rue, Rutgers University Press, 2006.
- Ritual at Work, Kursat Ozenc and Margaret Hagan, Wiley, 2019.
