Seven Key Learnings on How to Design Rituals for Org Change
There’s a widespread crisis in organizations around culture (see for instance Uber, VW, WellsFargo,) and employee engagement (with a 32% engagement rate.*)
Our team of Stanford and Oxford design researchers — Isabel Behncke, Margaret Hagan and Kursat Ozenc — decided to focus on the power of rituals as a way to address this crisis. Could we bring together the design practice and science behind rituals, along with study of how rituals have been applied in work life, to devise better ways to build good work cultures? Ritual is an integral part of what it is to be human, and it can bring in profound change in people and organizations. Here we share 7 key learnings from our work on rituals.
Last week we ran our pop-out class at Stanford d.school, Ritual Design for Organization Change. This time around, our focus was on rituals that could help transition times during team life cycles — when new members join, when there are conflicts or outright fights, when the organization as a whole has turnover, downsizing, or re-orgs, and when a team member leaves.
In our past org change classes, we had focused more on ‘positive’ moments in organizations — bringing out creativity, enhancing collaboration, and appreciating each other. We retained this focus in our class this quarter, but also encouraged participants to take on more negative and conflicted situations. How can we use rituals not only to enhance happiness and productivity, but also to resolve frictions and unhappiness in our work-lives? Especially since we learned in past workshops that rituals might have an ability to help teams grieve losses or departures — and that they can be power plays for people at the bottom of an org’s hierarchy to assert their own culture at work, we were excited to explore more ‘uncomfortable’ rituals this time around.
We were lucky to be joined by Isabel Behncke as a co-teacher. Isabel is a behavioral and evolutionary scientist working on the nature of social animals, including humans. Isabel’s focus on play, festivals, bonobos’ interactions, and ‘social technologies’ brought a lively new perspective to ritual design. In recent years, she has identified ‘interaction hacks’ that can quickly bond together people, if used in strategic ways. There is big crossover between her work and ritual design, particularly around using these intentional props and interactions to build special moments + connections.
We were also lucky to work with two corporate partners, SAP Labs Palo Alto and Microsoft Silicon Valley. The specific participating teams were Microsoft’s Garage & MileIQ teams, and SAP Labs’ d.shop and Innovation Center (ICN).
Prior to the workshop, we asked each partner team to do a quick inventory of their existing work place culture, documenting artifacts and spaces that have meaning for them. They shared with our teaching team some key places, like a meditation room, employee portrait walls, collaboration areas, and other distinctive spaces that illustrate their work culture.
In preparation for the workshop’s design cycle, we also asked each team to reflect on culture challenges that they are facing at the moment. These challenges became the basis for our participant teams to design rituals. The partners’ challenges varied from on-boarding new employees and teams, to cross-location sharing and collaboration, to promoting diversity and inclusion.
Learning 1. JUMP: Ground a ritual designer mindset
Our pop-up class was a two-day session — one day at Microsoft, the next at SAP Labs. Participants from Stanford and tech companies signed up to learn ritual design and practice crafting new work rituals.
We were aware that with such a limited time, our teaching team needed to balance just enough theory with lots of hand-on activity. We also needed to scope the challenges in a bite size manner so students were not overwhelmed and could engage with them quickly — understanding enough context to craft rituals. We also wanted them to get enough exposure and experience to methods so they can try it out in their own contexts after the workshop.
With these in mind, we did two exercises on Day One to build the students’ confidence and capacity in ritual design. First, we did an immediate dive into the deep end: challenging students, at the very start of the workshop to design two rituals. One, a welcome ritual; two, a goodbye ritual. We didn’t explain anything about what a ritual is or how to design one — but instead set a timer and asked teams to figure it out. This warmed up the participants to each other and also the topic right from the beginning. Everyone was able to design a ritual in 2 minutes, as long as they didn’t think too hard.
Second, later on in Day One, we scaffolded the teams up to tackle a fictional org culture challenge. Each table picked an envelope with a select case challenge, each about a different team lifecycle problem. For instance, one team worked on the “Disruptive Employee Fired” scenario, pictured below.
As they worked on these case challenges, participants got the chance to wear a ‘ritual designer’ hat for a specific context. The goal was to build their ritual improvisation skills. Again, it was a quick design cycle (only 5 minutes), but teams figured out how to take what they had just learned in our ritual design lecture to craft something to address the challenge. We observed that this kind of scaffolding of design exercises helped them to boost their confidence and ability.
This led into Day Two — with its full day design cycle, on their corporate partner’s real-world challenge. The teams had already designed at least 3 rituals quickly in Day One, so they were warmed up for prototyping real-world rituals.
Woven between the design activities, we had a series of 15-minute lectures to ground students in ritual design. This included definitions of what ritual is, the vectors of different levels of rituals, mechanics and patterns for how rituals tend to play out, and interaction hacks and social technologies to craft new, successful rituals. In earlier posts, we wrote about much of this already. For this post, we want to highlight the latter — behavioral synchronicity and interaction hacks.
Learning 2. PLAY: Synchronicity + serious play to get to a good ritual
In this class, we also explored rituals as part of a broader study of serious play and human and animal behavior. Isabel presented her work on how ritual and its ingredients are social technologies. If you observe bonobos’ interactions, alongside humans’, you can see how we interact with each other in playful, ways — using ‘interaction hacks’ — to create bonds, meaning, and values.
What are some of these social technologies, and how we can harness them as hacks for good rituals in the modern work place context?
Isabel’s research showed that food sharing, use of costumes/masks, and music/rhythm are three critical social technologies that make a good ritual. Among those we found the rhythm/music as a particularly strong one. Getting people in physical sync — through shared words/songs/chants, shared movements, or even shared rhythm — can be a powerful ritual interaction.
What does synchronicity brings to ritual? As people get in physical sync, behavioral synchronicity will follow — and so too, perhaps, will emotional synchronicity. In a way, the ritual participants will act like one unit, and feel a sense of belongingness. Think of a flock of birds, or a school of fish. Or remember Steve Jobs, who always took walking meetings to feel in sync with his colleagues.
Having primed students with just enough theory, we paired them up with Microsoft and SAP partners to challenge them to craft one ritual that might serve the purpose of solving the partner’s work challenge, but also be an inspiring, playful, and weird type of solution — not just a ‘transactional design’. Our partners were engaged with the process through, and co-created the rituals with the students. They brought a variety of team life-cycle challenges:
- on-boarding new employees,
- building more connection across dispersed offices,
- upping collaboration among employees interested in similar topics but working in different areas,
- maintaining the hackathon spirit when you come back to day-to-day drudgery, and
- fighting the meeting-overdose frenzy.
So, what did we learn from designing rituals and reflecting on our process + creations?
Learning 3. EXPERIMENT: Create structures not recipes
Many students asked us for structured recipes to create rituals. What are the exact ingredients to use? What is the playbook of rituals, that a manager can use to pull out the right ritual for a challenge that arises?
We have learned, though, that rituals are not meant for recipes. They need to be unique to an organization, and made with weird idiosyncrasies to be genuine (and to stick).
To that end, we frame ritual design as a kind of experience design. It means that when designing a ritual, you need to create a flexible structure for people to create their own experience. We talk about ensuring the design has a basic narrative arc, as a key criterion of quality. There should be a beginning, middle, and end.
But within that structure, a good ritual needs to have flexibility. If a ritual prescribes, or offers a recipe-like experience, it is likely to lose its authenticity. It will feel top-down or pre-packaged, and it won’t be embraced as legitimate. That said, there are interaction hacks and social technologies that we know are good ingredients for rituals — even if there are not perfect recipes for success.
4. ADAPT: Tune in & out the intensity based on frequency
Not all rituals are created equal. Some rituals are once-in-a-lifetime and intense experiences, some rituals are daily and low key. Ritual designers should be cognizant of the intensity and frequency levers for their given context.
Typically, as frequency increases, the intensity of a ritual decreases. Think of a daily coffee ritual versus Thanksgiving dinner. As teams work on their challenges, this insight came up several times. For instance, one team wanted to carry on their partner’s annual hackathon spirit to the rest of the year. As a response to such a need, they designed a ritual with higher frequency, and lower intensity. Or a team that wanted to take advantage of a once-a-year meeting for a company should create a high-intensity ritual that will be done once, to create more instant bonds and outcomes.
5. YES AND: Make improv an explicit part of ritual design
Ritual is a performance in its core, and the design of it requires lots of enactment. In our design cycles, we avoided writing as much as possible. We did not do traditional brainstorms of post-its on a board. We wanted to avoid transactional and analytic thinking, in which designers plot out interactions deliberately before actually trying them out.
Instead, we led with the bodystorming of interactions. Teams had to decide on a few ground rules: what context they were in, and what their intention was for a certain type of value, meaning, or emotion to emerge. But with that limited amount of context, they were then challenged to start acting out rituals. We introduced the fundamental principles of improvisation such as ‘yes and’ along with ‘and because’, ‘…’ to prime the students in their ritual design. Any group that we saw talking or writing too much, we had stand up and start acting out their plans. We also had a table full of props — bells, instruments, masks, snacks, kitchen appliances, scarves, kids’ toys, perfume sprays, and beyond — to introduce into their improv.
For future ritual design work, we will set even more activities around improvisation, bodystorming, and on-site ritual creation. Less thinking, more acting!
6. RELAX: Overcome the anxiety with practicing lateral thinking
Along with the strong desire for ritual design recipes and playbooks, we also observed an anxiety about doing this type of design work. We read this in multiple different ways.
There’s an anxiety around creating a ritual, precisely because it is not an analytical or transactional design. You can’t logically create or measure a ritual, so it is harder to know if you are doing things ‘right’. We tried to overcome this worry by having frequent, low-fi ritual creation sprints — where the focus was on just trying it out, over and over, and feeling what worked — rather than try to plan it extensively and get caught up in wondering whether it would feel like a ritual, or if people would actually do the thing.
The other element of anxiety was in doing something weird, and facing exposure or blowback. If you try to do something that is out of the ordinary in your organization — with the way you dress, using music and rhythm, asking people to take part in social events — there’s a worry that people will think it’s nonsense, distracting, or irrelevant. For this, we use the traditional design approach — prototype, iterate, see what sticks. You can try out a new idea for a ritual in a small way, see how people respond, and then add in more unusual elements gradually over time.
There’s also the anxiety over unknown. At the d.school, we are focused on this as a key learning outcome area: navigating ambiguity competency. This competency can be enhanced by relying on the process, and practicing the lateral thinking muscles.
For that purpose, we developed an app called IdeaPop, which gives people random provocations, to use as prompts to create a ritual. It takes a page from Surrealist games — to ‘stop making sense’, use these nonsensical prompts to craft something real.
7. LEAP: Make culture weird & quirky to get to the unique and meaningful
This final learning goes back to the ‘grounding a ritual designer’ mindset that we trained the students in. Shifting to this new mindset can be challenging within our efficiency-obsessed work culture. How do we bring back a bit of the irrationality back to our organizations, so people are allowed to be quirky, and weird? How do we relearn our innate ability to be playful?
As Isabel has observed in her work studying festivals, rituals, and serious play, these are special places, where the normal rules do not apply. You can create small zones where people can engage in more creative, meaningful interactions. It’s very powerful to break down hierarchies, open new channels, and bond people together.
At the heart of a ritual, there’s serious play. Serious play as a social construct provides a safe space for ritual participants to be vulnerable. Vulnerability brings two things. First, it helps participants to build trust among themselves. Second, it helps participants to be open to experiment with behaviors they normally wouldn’t do outside of a ritual context.
Co-authored with Margaret Hagan, and Isabel Behncke. We would like to thank our partners SAP Labs Palo Alto and Microsoft SV; Stanford students and Stanford community for their energy and participation.
We will be writing another piece soon that profiles the various rituals that emerged out of the workshop. Stay tuned! In the meantime, let us know what interaction hacks, workplace rituals, and social technologies you have observed or created.
*According to Gallup’s ongoing employee engagement survey. “Gallup categorizes workers as “engaged” based on their ratings of key workplace elements — such as having an opportunity to do what they do best each day, having someone at work who encourages their development and believing their opinions count at work — that predict important organizational performance outcomes.”
