The Pilgrimage of Business
Jonathan Cook:
Welcome to This Human Business, a podcast devoted to the articulation of a human alternative to the automations and algorithms of conventional business culture.
Last week’s episode of this podcast was about the importance of harnessing alternative modes of time, not just speeding up or slowing down, but connecting to qualitatively different kinds of time, human experiences of the present moment that defy simple quantitative measurement.
In this week’s episode, we will follow the path of a specific cultural practice that’s designed to evoke and embrace an alternative form of time. We’ll be talking about what it would mean if business could be conducted as a pilgrimage rather than as a transaction.
What is a pilgrimage? It’s not just any sort of travel, although many sorts of travel can become pilgrimages. Pilgrimage is purposeful travel in which the purpose of the travel is not the destination, but the experience of the journey itself.
Upon me using the word “journey”, there will be some user experience professionals whose ears will perk up in the expectation that I’ll soon be talking about constructing customer journey maps. These listeners are both right and wrong about what I’m aiming at.
Customer journeys might be one type of the business pilgrimages that I’m talking about, although business professionals may become pilgrims as well. Customer journeys of the sort that are typically mapped out by design thinkers are certainly not what I have in mind.
Consider a map published by Vendasta that the company refers to as the “Modern Customer Journey”. It begins with “Interest and Awareness”. The second step is “Search”. Next is “Research”, then “Purchase”, and finally “Experience”. It all sounds like the sort of thing that could happen within 10 minutes, without a person ever actually moving any part of their bodies other than their fingers.
The disconnected nature of it all is summed up in Vendasta’s details of what might happen during the final stage of Experience: A social post, writing a review, or blogging. Surely there’s more to experience than that.
Seeing this supposed customer journey, we have no idea where the customer has come from, where they’re standing in the present, and where they’d like to go. Even worse, we don’t understand what people are feeling, what hopes and fears are pushing them forward and holding them back.
Jessa Gamble, author of The Siesta and the Midnight Sun, has taken the time to contemplate what separates truly special experiences from those with a merely transient impact. She is currently writing about the experience of awe.
Jessa Gamble:
You have this heightened attention which is part of it, and so it’s a very memorable moment for you, and at the same time, because of what you see, because it’s not embedded in your every day, you don’t have those sort of place and time cues to hook it to. It’s like there are false senses of transformation and awe. There are times when you go out to the Grand Canyon with a group of people and you’ve experienced this awe, and on the bus back, it’s like these are my brothers forever, right? You feel like, so like this experience changed my life, but often it doesn’t. It doesn’t at all. You just go back to your own. It’s like this peak experience that stands apart from time. But that’s like kind of it.
So, I wonder how what makes the difference, you know, these astronauts who look down at Earth and they have these sort of moments of awe and connectedness and they say that it changes them forever, but does it only change them because they’re asked about it again forever afterwards or is it like, you know, how, what makes for an awe moment that’s truly effective, and that really like gets integrated into your life, and another one that’s just sort of like I went to this great concert?
Jonathan Cook:
Jessa speaks of the quest for experiences that provoke enduring transformations. This same pursuit is what pilgrimages are designed for. They are physical journeys that are supposed to change people on the inside.
What changes pilgrims isn’t their arrival at the end of their trip, but the things that happen to them along the way. The long, slow hike connects the pilgrim’s exertions and the events that occur along the path into a single storyline. It’s the emotional movement that accompanies physical movement that makes a pilgrimage a pilgrimage.
So, if we’re aiming at bringing pilgrimages into commercial culture, we need to create customer journey maps that show movement along emotional dimensions as well as physical ones. It’s rare to see a customer journey map that even approaches this level of cartography, however. In digital user experience especially, customers are regarded as little more than inert objects who just sit there, never moving except to tap at a little glass screen.
The lack of physical or emotional movement in most user experience frameworks is ironic, given the origin of the word “customer”. Back at the very origin of commerce, thousands of years ago, trade occurred on the borders between rival groups of people. Though these groups ordinarily would be hostile toward each other, they established special places on the boundaries of their territories where violence was forbidden, places where exchange of goods and services could take place. These were the first markets, and the first customs checkpoints.
A customer was a person who came to these borderland markets, traveling to the edge of what was known to make themselves accustomed to a foreign presence, to obtain something that was unavailable back at home. For these original customers, commerce was an act of pilgrimage.
Helping the culture of commerce to get back in touch with the physical landscape that inspired such transformational journeys, Matthew Burgess, who develops methods for unlocking creativity in professional environments, reflects on the purposefully meandering paths he often takes on his way into work.
Matthew Burgess:
A meander is what happens in a river, isn’t it, in the lower stages of a river when it’s not so fast flowing. So I’m thinking of a river that flows quite slowly but deliberately almost. I like the imagery of meandering, because it’s not following the quickest way from point A to point B. If you look down at a river plain you think, how is it carving this sinuous swirl throughout the landscape like that? I imagine it probably did follow the path of least resistance at some point or other, but actually the river is getting to the sea, and it doesn’t need you to try and hide it and change that. I think what I like about the idea of meandering as a meander sounds as if there’s a deliberateness to it. It’s not a wobble. It ties in with this this idea of I’m deliberately not doing the thing which is seen to be the most efficient all the time.
Jonathan Cook:
Matthew wouldn’t just meander his way into work. He also made meandering a practice while at work.
Matthew Burgess:
I used to literally walk the building. I had been there for a long time and I’d worked on all floors and so I used to sometimes walk through out the building quite slowly. I’d walk across the floors and down the stairs, because I wanted to see what would happen, that sometimes you’d catch sight of, some teams had posted some stuff up on a wall, or there was something on a white board that was interesting, or there were some people talking and you just pick up these little bits of these hums and the sense of the company working in areas that I didn’t come into contact with, I didn’t know anything about.
I think that when you are meandering, you are creating a much more fertile ground. The river that meanders covers a lot more square meterage.
You just pick up little bits and pieces. Whenever I’m working anywhere, I don’t believe I’m there to do a single thing. I believe that that’s one of the reasons I’m there, but actually I’m there to pick up all the things I can about how the company is working and to see if there are ways that I can connect those because again if you think about a river that’s that’s going from one side of a floodplain to the other that it’s this force. It might pick up, might just scrape off a little bit of dirt from an an overhang on one side of the valley and swirl around to the other and drop it off there somewhere. It’s kind of engaging this the big mixing process. I thought that that’s one of the things I love to do. I love to have a conversation and you pick something up with someone that you bump into and then you might pass the information on.
I think a workplace that recognizes the value of it, would almost have to recognize the value of nonwork, if that’s a way of looking at it, I suppose, if you look to the river from source to sea, and you can see that rivers flow downhill and that you can see that a river’s goal is to get to the sea. I suppose it’s maybe it’s like this: I think a workplace that acknowledged that there isn’t, that there’s a counter goal to every goal that you have, and that that counter goal will run, could run at cross purposes to the goal that it’s tied to, but it’s part of it.
Jonathan Cook :
In his meanderings at work, Matthew gets to the heart of what pilgrimage is all about. It’s not about accomplishing a goal or solving a problem. In fact, pilgrimage is about making things more difficult than they have to be.
Making things more difficult than they have to be is the opposite of the conventional business approach, which seeks to make operations as efficient as possible. As Matthew’s metaphor of the meandering river shows, however, although making a straight line towards a goal is quick, it doesn’t provide the maximum productivity.
It is anathema in conventional business culture to suggest that slowdowns and circuitous tasks can lead to superior results. Business orthodoxy regards human beings as objects to be measured and arranged in tremendous architectures of profit, as if they were nothing more than tools within a gigantic machine, performing concrete tasks under coherent direction. Human experience, however, is complex rather than complicated, operating on a level that is emergent from predictable physicality but transcending it.
What the Quantified Self in business cannot comprehend is that humans do their best work when they confront the unknown. Matthew has surrendered himself to pilgrimages into the unknown, and emerged with the wisdom necessary to counterbalance the beast of efficiency.
Matthew Burgess:
There’s an unknown in all these things, and I think this unknown thing is part of how creativity works, but you have to go into the unknown to find the new, and I think that you can’t find an efficient, well I won’t say that you can’t, but to efficiently go into the unknown feels like something which I don’t think I’d trust someone to say that, I will efficiently go and explore the unknown.
If you’re trying to find something new, then that process involves surrendering yourself to a bit of inefficiency.
If you use another English mythology of The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe stories, where there’s another world that you go into, and that this world is separate from your existing world, and you go into it in a particular way, like you’re going through a wardrobe, I like the wardrobe thing because it felt ordinary and yet inside was something extraordinary.
If you’re going to have this unknown that you are exploring within the work world, that there is a place to go to it and then a place to come back from it, and that the things that you bring back are there to kind of balance the efficiency beast.
You’ve got to find your way into and out of these places without a map. You know that you there might be some familiar bits and pieces that there might be some ways in and out, but your compasses don’t work in there.
Jonathan Cook:
Pilgrimage is a process of deliberate disorientation. A person going on pilgrimage chooses the slowest method of transportation possible, so as to make the familiar strange, and become susceptible to happy accidents.
Digital businesses, with their focus on predicting consumer behavior, have missed the secret behind happy accidents. They believe that happiness is achieved through careful planning, but pilgrims making their way through the marketplace have always practiced the craft of making themselves susceptible to the influence of the unexpected.
How can any accident be considered happy? Happiness is the opposite of an algorithm. It’s about the ability to find importance in the things that just so happen to happen, which includes the most important things in life. Happiness is based in the old Viking word “happ”, a word that refers to unexpected fate, just as pilgrimage delivers people to a destination that evades all straightforward attempts to reach it. Pilgrimage is about happenstance, the kind of ambiguity that data analytics seeks to obliterate. Through pilgrimage, people insist that happiness is not found through the satisfaction of our desires, but through the meaningful frustration of them. Happiness is about what happens along the wayside, rather than the way itself. The journey is what happens when we step off the path.
In order to have moments of happenstance, there needs to be the possibility of becoming lost.
The spirit of pilgrimage is not in accord with Guthook Guides, the smartphone app for trail hikers. The app is supposed to assist with the struggles of navigating trails through the wilderness, but ends up destroying the feeling of being in wilderness at all. On the Appalachian Trail, there are reports of huge stretches of the path filled with hikers walking through beautiful wilderness with their smartphones held out in front of them, looking at a little digital map of where they are instead of looking at where they are. The Guthook Guides app has turned a great American pilgrimage of nature into just another digital wasteland, an onscreen competition in which staying on track and on time becomes the main point, and the possibility of becoming lost is lost.
Not all who are lost are wandering. Meike Ziegler, who designs ritual experiences for corporate clients, explains that those who follow the way of the pilgrim have entered the directionless space of ritual for a purpose.
Meike Ziegler:
Quite a lot of people that I know have done pilgrimages. There’s Santiago, and I always wonder is that something I would do or would I create my own pilgrimage, or what is this a path to somewhere.
I would come up with a complete new concept based on the ingredients of what the moment was about, or the symbols. I work very much with symbols, but everything I do is tangible.
I always say I work with tangible, I work with things we can hold onto, and there’s a symbolic meaning in everything, and so it’s in how you learn to look. I teach them how to look at things in a different way.
Jonathan Cook:
Rituals communicate information, but they’re not data-driven. In fact, the communication that takes place within a ritual is often purposefully false, on a literal level. It’s symbolic.
Meike Ziegler:
Maybe it’s good to give an idea of a creatual I did for Unilever for they have been working with the dream factory in Holland, Unilever Holland and Benelux. The headquarters are in Rotterdam and they asked me the Consultancy agency, the Dream Factory asked me to do the launch of the purpose that they had been trying to come up with the Unilever managers. So they worked in six sessions through the year and then they had their purpose and they asked me to do the launch.
So what I did with 70 managers in a beautiful space and we decorated it very beautifully. I gave them a piece of soap a like a piece of cake of glycerin and a wooden stick. And I asked them to write their own purpose their own intention for the company or for the future in the soap their own words. And they made a big pad and all these pieces of soap with writings went into the pan and melted and then we had a big table with a mould and we put in the White soap the white canvas with all the words in there. Often you don’t see any more when you write what you what you do with creatual but you know what you wrote. And often when something’s hidden you know even better than what you wrote then they wrote with this ink blue ink on the brand colour. “We create social warming.” This was their line for their purpose for the future.
First of all they don’t expect a thing like that. They are really pulled out of their comfort zone to writes on a piece of soap and to put this into a pan and you always get the question why am I destroying something, because out of destruction you recreate.
Well I am much more vulnerable now. I am more of an artist. Like I call myself more an artist I call myself a creative alchemist really. Because I mix and match different ingredients and I always try to design gold somehow, or my intent is to create gold.
Jonathan Cook:
Meike understands the creation of wealth as an alchemical process, a metaphor of the transmutation of base impulses into higher ideals. Such a transformation requires a ritual guide. That’s the role that Meike plays for her clients.
Meike Ziegler:
I never know what’s going to happen, really. I know the beginning and the end and in between it’s always interesting to see what happens.
I always had this dream to build this creatual house that people could come to build pilgrimage. That’s maybe the pilgrimage to come to this space. That’s already filling in the walls and everywhere are rituals you can’t see them but they’re there because we had moments that we celebrated something we left marks in the building.
People are still afraid of the word ritual. The word ritual is, it’s difficult.
I think it’s for me it’s bringing people into a set of a series of steps and I create a framework with a beginning and an end. But within the framework I let them free and things happen.
The most important thing when it’s in mind is when it becomes a ritual is that there is a certain intent and it’s meaningful that people have can stand still and understand. This is not an everyday thing. This is not a habit. This is marking a moment, or standing still at the the problem, or to step over the line to the next the next chapter to mark this with a group of people. I think that is really what it’s about.
You mark something. You remember something. You celebrate something. That for me is a ritual.
Jonathan Cook:
Meike talks about how her rituals create a series of steps for people to go through, enabling them to step over the line into a new chapter in their lives, even if they are standing still in a literal sense.
Pilgrimage is just one kind of ritual. Nonetheless, pilgrimage is one of the primary physical metaphors for the ritual process.
One obvious level of this metaphor is that a pilgrimage is a journey, while rituals create a feeling of journey, in the sense of transformation. Another aspect to this metaphor, however, is that the most effective rituals require struggle and sacrifice, as if the ritual participant was laboring to travel a long distance on foot.
Vasco Gaspar, a specialist in human flourishing begins to explain how the sacrifice of ritual is manifest in commercial settings, and how that makes pilgrimage in particular relevant.
Vasco Gaspar:
I remember when I did a program in California it was a one year program and I needed to go there four times during one year to study and so on and comparing to some of my colleagues that were doing the program and they were from San Francisco I sensed that I value the experience much more than they did because for me I needed to invest not only money as they invested the money but there was much more than that. It was an investment of time. There was a new investment of physical energy actually because to go into planes and so on. So that brings you a sense of value which as I once had program online might from this program and I didn’t experience and this was expense of the program in the beginning was completely free. So I said it’s free. You can go for the eight-week program. You just sign in and do the program. I was kind of tracking the amount of people that dropped out, and the drop outs, it was a huge rate I would say 60, 70 percent of people just signed in and stayed for a while and then dropped off.
Jonathan Cook:
What Vasco discovered was that without the sacrifice of physical travel, time, and money, people tend to disengage. Cheap and easy products and services are as easy to throw away and forget as they are to purchase.
The world of commerce has become the opposite of pilgrimage. It’s a placeless pursuit of shallow travel in which our work, and what are called “customer journeys” possess little opportunity for transformation at all. Re-envisioning the marketplace as a place of pilgrimage, as it once truly was, enables us to reintroduce a sense of significance to business, to cut through the reliance on shallow habits, sales gimmicks, and behavioral addictions to something worth believing in.
I’ll never forget the disappointing moment, back in the 1990s, when a manager from a client team explained to me why he believed human experiences such as emotion and culture are irrelevant in business. Consumers, he told me, make their decisions based on just three factors: Convenience, low cost, and easily accessible location.
Pilgrimage is the opposite of what this manager had to work with. Pilgrimage is inconvenient, more expensive than necessary, and requires great struggle to reach its end. These aren’t shortcomings of pilgrimage, however, but the source of its power.
When a commercial experience is cheap and easy, it becomes commoditized, stripped down to the bare bones of what people expect, the minimally viable product so many designers aim for these days. However, when a commercial experience is designed to require sacrifice, in the right way, it becomes more highly valued by consumers.
The trick is to understand the distinction between sacrifice and hardship. Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl advised people that despair is suffering minus meaning. Another way of phrasing this emotional equation is to say that when meaning is added to suffering, despair disappears. Commercial experiences that are simply abusive don’t become pilgrimages. Rather, pilgrimages can be constructed around commercial experiences in which people, customers and people working in the business alike, have come to believe a greater purpose beyond literal function is being shared. People will want to linger around such a special experience, and invest in it, to extend the feeling of significance it musters.
This is what it means to create pilgrimages of commercial culture. Pilgrimages start with meaning. Just as the journey to Mecca came after the revelations of the Prophet Mohammed, businesses first need to summon a sincere commitment to something worth believing in. Only then can they build long, rich experiences in which consumers willingly sacrifice extra money, time, and effort for a product that is the same as what a competitor can offer.
Pilgrimage asks its participants to invest their effort, much as a good farmer invests carbon-bearing richness into the soil. The origin of the word pilgrimage has its roots in agriculture, from the Latin per – agri, meaning to go beyond one’s own familiar fields.
Next week, this metaphorical relationship with the ground will be explored further, although from a different perspective. Whereas pilgrimage directs us out into an unknown world, next week’s episode of This Human Business directs our vision inward, contemplating the metaphor of business as a kind of garden.
Thank you for listening to this week’s episode of This Human Business, and thank you to Meydan, who composed and performed the music that opens and closes each episode. The song is called Underwater, and it’s from the album For Creators.