The Rituals of Commerce – Episode 4
The following is a transcript of the 4th episode of the podcast This Human Business. You can listen to the podcast through the widget on this page or find it on iTunes or Stitcher.
Jonathan Cook: Hello, and welcome to This Human Business, a podcast that talks about a movement that’s growing in business culture to defy the trend of the automation of everything. Here and there, professionals are working to explore the unique value that human experience brings to business.
This week’s episode deals with a subject that will seem strange to some people: The role of ritual experiences in commercial culture.
It’s okay to regard rituals in business as a strange idea. The whole point of ritual is the juxtaposition of the familiar with the strange.
Business is used to powering itself on the stories it tells. Stories told out of context, however, bring us nowhere.
Think of the stories you’ve heard about business recently. How many of them actually moved you – I mean actually caused you to move? When you turn on Bloomberg TV, or read Forbes magazine, how often do the stories you encounter there actually change who you are and the way that you do business?
Looking for something deeper? You may remember David Altschul from an earlier episode, talking about the power of story.
David Altschul: The default is the money story. This thing has certain practical attributes. It costs a certain amount of money, and it’s better or not better than the thing that I was previously using to provide that function. That’s a story. That’s the money story. That’s basically the story of a commodity. And so, if you want to build a brand that has a premium position in the marketplace, it needs to mean something. It has to mean something. It will mean something that goes beyond the commodity story.
It’s not that you don’t make money on it. Your audience is not stupid. They understand that if you’re in a commercial enterprise you need to bring in more money than you spend in order to stay in business, but you can’t expect them to form a relationship, to feel connected with your brand around your money story. That’s really your problem. The issue is: Is there anything else there that lives alongside the money story? And, for most successful brands, there is.
Jonathan Cook: Storytelling has been a big trend in business, and a positive one, because it connects abstract ideas to human experiences. It shifts brand positions into emotional positions, getting beyond the functional level of marketing, helping businesses escape the commodity trap.
David Altschul: If you put a brand out into the world the first question that it begs is: What does this mean? Should I care? Is this simply another variation of a familiar product or service, in which case, all I need to know is: Does it work better or worse than the one I’m already using, and what does it cost? But, that’s not a brand. That’s really a commodity, and if you’re trying to develop a brand that has value that goes beyond the transaction, then there needs to be an answer to that story. What does this mean over and above just the exchange?
Jonathan Cook: David points out that merely functional economic exchange isn’t enough to develop a brand. Jonah Sachs, author of the books Winning the Story Wars and Unsafe Thinking, goes further, to suggest that storytelling, as important as it is, isn’t sufficient either. We need to place story in the context of actually doing something, in the context of ritual.
Jonah Sachs: I wrote about ritual in terms of explaining how myth acts in society, and basically saying that, you know, myths are meaning stories around which societies have always been built. Myths are not just lies, as we use them today, and myths are these core stories that people tell and retell and in doing so kind of form their core identity and their behaviors, and so they combine four things: An explanation of how the world works, a sense of meaning, so you don’t just hear the story, but you know where you fit in the world when you hear that story, the third thing is story itself, so it’s symbolic, it takes place in a magical or another time and place, not just outside in your backyard, and then finally ritual, it gives you a way to live those stories out in your own life, to actually enact them.
Jonathan Cook: Jonah is an expert in the ways that storytelling contributes to business, but acknowledges that story only goes so far. Ritual is the cultural tool that connects stories to outward behavior. Ritual brings abstract ideas into action, and action is what business is really all about.
What is ritual? Ritual is one of those words that means different things in different contexts. In terms of this discussion, I’m using the word “ritual” in the way that a cultural anthropologist would, with the following definition: Ritual is a cultural process of symbolic behavior that enables participants to transform their identities through the creation of a threshold experience in which they become temporarily free from the restrictions that ordinarily shape their lives.
From that definition, the following are the core concepts to begin with:
1. Ritual is behavior. It’s not a way of thinking or feeling. If there isn’t action going on, it isn’t a ritual.
2. Ritual is a cultural practice. It’s not a logical problem solving process. Ritual plays with beliefs and rhythms of life that are so deeply embedded in our cultural identities that we often don’t even notice they exist.
3. Ritual is about the transformation of identity. When we go through rituals, we become someone else. Sometimes that change in identity is temporary, but sometimes it lasts the rest of our lives.
4. Ritual works by creating what are called liminal experiences, thresholds that exist on their own terms, in the places between where we are coming from and where we want to get to.
When I talked with Bhavik Joshi, Strategic Director at LPK, about his work in the humanization of business, he compared these thresholds to seams that patch together the fabric of a person’s present identity with the material from which a potential future identity could be made. Businesses that are beginning to work along these seams, he says, are Patagonia and AirBnB.
Bhavik Joshi: One of the things that I kind of appreciate about well made brands is the idea of the human experience or the human condition existing irrespective of a transactional interaction with that brand or its products. I think that’s where the power of guiding somebody through those transitional thresholds comes into play. So, Patagonia allows you to come into the brand at any given point. It could be a pair of gloves or one of their gears, or you could also come into it through, I think they have beer now. I think they have food you can make, and then there is the general mindset of sustainability to kind of keep people constantly aware of the impact that their products are having, but also in general.
Recently, you must have seen their home page on their web site that says, ‘The President stole your land,’ when the shrinking of the national monument happened, the Bear’s Ears. So, I think the idea that at a moment in your life when you are uncertain of what your role is, and how you want to kind of find meaning in that role, or find the meaning of that role, or discover how you want to leverage the power of that role that you’re in, to move from your current experience to the next experience, which typically is spiraling upwards, I think. It has the same characteristics but with a deeper or higher meaning, than you have experienced in the past.
I think that’s where the brand is like: Here is a question, or here is a challenge, here is a form of an introspection that will allow you to move from one threshold to the next. One example is Patagonia, but in a broader sense I think even brands like AirBnB that works in the trust economy, the idea of trust that manifests itself both ways, where I have to leave you a review, but you can’t see my review until you leave me a review, it kind of draws attention to those thresholds.
If you think about it, most of this world, or most of the commercial world, or the brand world, or the business world, especially with the use of technology, is trying to make things seamless. It’s trying to make all experiences feel like they can very fluidly flow from one into the other. Here is a brand, AirBnB, that is actually drawing attention to the seam. It is making the seam even more prominent and kind of focusing all your attention to it, and therefore, the crossing of that seam becomes even more meaningful.
So, it’s meaningful in a way that adds to the narrative that they want to create, the equity, quote unquote, to use marketing jargon, the equity that they want to build, and the equity is around trust. The equity is around belonging everywhere. So, when they say that, you know what, you’ve checked out of a place, but that doesn’t seamlessly end everything, and you have to request to book a place, and then somebody says yes or no, and you have to introduce yourself, and in the same way you have to leave a review, but your review won’t be posted until their review is actually online, I think that is in a smaller way, in smaller subtler ways, those are the thresholds that a brand can be active in.
Jonathan Cook: Bhavik brings up an important point: Business naturally takes place in threshold settings, places where people are in transition between different experiences. Yet, the ways that most businesses are working with the special power of this transitional space are subtle, and hesitant.
It’s telling that both Patagonia and AirBnB are working with concepts of travel. AirBnB experiences are often crudely transactional in practice, but at its best, AirBnB enables travelers to interact with their hosts in ways that ritually initiate them to some extent into the local culture.
Patagonia sells a more metaphorical sense of travel, by providing clothes as tools that connect to outdoor spaces that, from the perspective of the overwhelming indoor office space we occupy most of the time, feel under threat. Patagonia invites us to go on a more profound journey as we plan a hike up into the hills. Patagonia suggests a ritual of rebellious escape.
In these examples, however, the ritual aspects of the commercial experience are merely hinted at. There’s a huge potential that isn’t yet being grasped.
Bhavik Joshi: I feel like the manifestation of the meaning of rituals is incredibly important, and of course coming from a culture where rituals are part and parcel of the construct of any event or non-event that happens in your life, I feel like they have the power to imbue life experiences and brand experiences with such energy that it almost becomes inseparable from the experience that you are having in your life. I will honestly say that in my work right now, the role of rituals is extremely nascent. That is not so much out of lack of interest as maybe just out of lack of opportunity to make more of that happen.
Jonathan Cook: Bhavik expresses this idea well. The role of rituals in commercial culture is nascent. It’s just in the process of being born.
Business leaders who are connected with the cultures that they serve have an innate sense that there is an opportunity for a closer human engagement through ritualized commercial interactions. They craft experiences with suggestions of a few ritual elements in them, doing so instinctually, without even thinking about what they’re doing as ritual. What they lack is a larger, comprehensive framework with which to organize and enhance these elements to make the ritual experience live up to its potential.
It’s no surprise that the efforts of businesses to create ritualized moments of consumption should be so halting and incomplete. As this week’s bonus episode of This Human Business explains, commerce has its roots in powerful ancient mythology. The cultural tradition out of which modern business arose, however, first through the Protestant Reformation, then through the Enlightenment, then with the Industrial Revolution, and now with the Digital Revolution, has rejected the validity of ritual practice and subjective experience in favor of linear thinking and literal problem solving. Over hundreds of years, we have lost touch with the craft of ritual design, replacing it with minimally viable user experience platforms.
It’s a shame, because the need for ritual management of our commercial identities has never been greater. Now that the initial, exciting surge of digital innovation is over, users are becoming disenchanted and distrustful of on-screen interactions.
Professional life inside business is in a cultural crisis as well. Recent research suggests that only between 10 and 15 percent of corporate employees feel engaged with their work. We are expected to project an image of energy and optimism, but the truth is that the vast majority of people working in business are going through the motions at best. Some of us have been so alienated by employers that we’re actively engaged in sabotaging the businesses we’re being paid to serve.
Scott Dawson, a designer who’s done a lot of work in the financial industry, told me of his own experience with this kind of alienation. His warning: Company culture doesn’t take care of itself.
Scott Dawson: I think one challenge with growth of a company through acquisition is that a company has a certain culture, and that’s a really soft word, because it can mean any number of things. It can mean the way that people talk to each other, the process by which you set up a meeting and run a meeting, the general tone of top down communication. All that, you become comfortable with it, and then when it changes, you notice that it changes.
So, when I joined in, it was 1996 when I started my job there, it was the end of a period of relatively long stability. This is Citibank, you know, the Citi never sleeps. Then, they started to have a lot of acquisitions and mergers, and it became Citigroup. Travelers came in and Solomon Smith Barney came in. Solomon Smith Barney, of course, being a really aggressive brokerage, at least from my perspective, it was great. I got to work with a lot of people. I ended up doing work directly with Smith Barney technology on some projects, and I got exposed to different things, but from my perspective as somebody who had been there so long, that culture I felt so comfortable with had changed so much that it just didn’t feel like it was home any more.
Looking back in hindsight, I think that I was probably looking around at what some of my friends were doing at different places. Like, someone would go work at Yahoo, or someone would go work at Google. They’re working on different projects, and I’m sort of working on the same project over and over again. These are like corporate utility projects I’m working on, and there’s not a whole lot of wow factor with those, you know?
I got anxious and antsy, and I wanted to look around and see what was out there, and once I realized I wanted to go somewhere, I started to see more of the things you didn’t like about your current situation. Once you start to make a decision that, yeah, that I might almost be done, then you start to see reasons, you start to rationalize your decision making, right?
Jonathan Cook: Scott didn’t leave Solomon Smith Barney because of inadequate pay, or even because he didn’t enjoy his work. He left because the culture of his company no longer felt like home. Once that feeling of belonging to a community of work was gone, his perceptions of other aspects of the company culture began to fade as well.
Effective corporate culture isn’t just a matter of setting rules for expected behavior. Business culture needs ritual management.
Why work with ritual to intentionally design company culture? A business is much more than just a legal entity constructed with the purpose of creating profit for its investors. If a business is going to survive, it needs to function as a community. Rituals foster community by giving us common meaningful experiences that support a sense of common purpose.
That sense of common purpose is what’s missing in commercial culture, both for employees and for consumers.
Today is the day of Apple’s release of its latest products. For a couple of years, the novelty of the technology grabbed people’s attention, but in recent years, enthusiasm has waned. It’s an event, but not much of a ritual. Apple hasn’t given people a coherent sense of involvement for years. There’s no sense of common experience or shared struggle that justifies the sacrifice of over a thousand dollars for a phone.
Apple leaves us with nothing to motivate us but technical function – and really, how much more function do we need out of a telephone? Anthropologist Tom Maschio explains that properly ritualized commercial events give us a higher purpose: They show us a clear path on our search for meaning.
Tom Maschio I think consumer culture is often a search for meaning. It’s not merely a search or a set of practices that ensure a material comfort. It’s not really a search for fun or pleasure or status or an attempt to satisfy basic necessity. The search for meaning is often a search for or sometimes results in the consumer having a sense of the sacred in the everyday, the everyday product, the everyday activity.
I think this sense is a strong emotional benefit for consumers and it’s the creation and evocation, in this sense, is an important objective of the routines and rituals that surround product usage or service usage and you know I think one of the points that always come back to that I learned when studying ritual is that and I often use this idea. It’s the idea of the deeper significance of ordinary things and that’s particularly familiar to anthropologists to those who take part in the study of ritual
Jonathan Cook: Tom reveals a key benefit of ritual design for businesses. Ritualization provides ordinary objects with a sense of larger significance.
This assertion is backed up with solid experimental research. A team led by Kathleen Vohs and Francesca Gino conducted a series of experiments a few years ago that showed that adding a simple ritual experience to the process of consumption of a chocolate bar increased the perceived quality of the chocolate, and increased the amount of money people were willing to pay for it by 70 percent.
Ritual in commerce has a really good rate of return on investment. So, how do we design it?
Tom Maschio: There are many theories of ritual. There are theories of ritual, not one theory of it, but in general I would say in the theoretical kind of frame that I follow the ritual places ordinary things within a special field of meaning, almost so that participants will really pay attention to those things and to that field.
I’ll just quote Lewis here, Gilbert Lewis. He says, “During a ritual, instead of seeing an object or action in a conventional way, we un-gate our vision and search out its special qualities which have no relevance in the ordinary economy of our perceptual and practical dealings with it, but by which, but which by close attention, by some sort of short circuit of thought, may provide an intimation of a mystery.”
So, in this way, ritual creates a sense that the object attended to is something memorable, complex and symbolic of deeper values, and something of a sacred sense attaches to it. So, that’s kind of my way of taking consumer culture very seriously as an aspect of culture, and having these dimensions to these meaningful dimensions to it, that I think my clients really have to know about before they can create effective advertising, before they can innovate, do product innovation and design innovation. Before they can do a whole host of things, they have to understand the essential meaningful dimension of their service, their product, their brand, and one of the ways of getting at that understanding is by leveraging various anthropological theories of meaning and especially of ritual.
Jonathan Cook: Tom gives us a good first step in ritual design: Place the commercial experience outside of the ordinary frame of reference.
This is not about putting on a really big sale with deep discounts, like Amazon does with its Prime Day. There’s no cultural setting for Prime Day, and nothing really to do but to sift through communications about apparently random collections of products for price savings. Amazon gets a temporary boost in sales through Prime Day, but does nothing for itself in the long run. It remains a huge company without a real brand, a giant without a soul.
Contrast that with what used to happen on Black Friday. People who get up in the middle of the night to go shopping certainly aren’t chasing convenience. Part of their goal is to find low prices, but low prices are also available at other times and places. Why bother participating in Black Friday in particular?
I’ve been doing ethnographic participant observation of Black Friday celebrations for many years now, and one of the things that I’ve found is that the classic Black Friday experience incorporates several of the elements of ritual. There are seven of these core elements, and the first of them is separation. Black Friday wasn’t just an ordinary day in which people could go to a store and get discounts. Part of the Black Friday ritual was to get up in the middle of the night, go out into the dark and the cold, and enter stores hours before they would ordinarily be open.
We all know that roaming around in the middle of the night isn’t something that nice people ordinarily do. Sneaking around in the dark is something that thieves do. So, shopping in the middle of the night on Black Friday gives people an emotional feeling of finding “a steal” without having to actually break the law. This irrational aspect of the commercial experience will be especially appreciated by those of you who have listened to this week’s bonus episode.
Black Friday takes place immediately after Thanksgiving, a time when saving money is not the point at all. To the contrary, Thanksgiving is about generosity to others and time spent at home. Both Thanksgiving and Black Friday are commercially ritualized, but in opposite ways. Whereas Thanksgiving is a ritual of separation from the world outside the family, Black Friday is a ritual of separation from the home and family.
In the last few years, Black Friday has lost much of its ritualization. Black Friday got a bad reputation when consumers got especially enthusiastic. Businesses panicked, not realizing that the bad reputation was part of the package. Danger gave the event relevance, in comparison to the mellow safety of Thanksgiving. Popular outrage against the ritualized shopping holiday actually increased its appeal.
Now, with Black Friday shopping taking place all throughout the month of November, and can be done online from the comfort of one’s own home. As a result, the sense of ritualization around Black Friday has been broken. Enthusiasm for Black Friday is waning because there’s no separation of the event in time or space.
Tom has observed the importance of an alternative sense of time in the creation of ritual – what anthropologist Victor Turner has called a “moment in and out of time”.
Tom Maschio: Rituals often have an emotional cadence to them like a theatrical performance or a song performance. They build toward an emotional crescendo sometimes or they seek to deliver a certain sort of emotional experience to a person. I see people as engaged in performances when they use a product or service when they consume or enter into an experience.
For instance, the experience of virtual reality is a new technology that we just have done a long project on. When they kind of engage with this technology, they’re entering into a ritual field that they’re there doing things in that field. There’s a strong emotional dimension to these performances and theories of ritual help me get at that and try to understand that, because it’s very important for clients, for them to understand the emotional hook of a service or product.
Jonathan Cook: Separation from ordinary reality enables us to enter the ritual field. This separation is not achieved easily, and that’s the point. The conventional approach to business focuses on lowering functional obstacles to purchase, by lowering price, establishing a location that’s close to where people are, and generally making it as convenient as possible for people to buy.
This approach makes sense from the perspective of an engineer who is seeking to create a machine that works at optimum efficiency. Businesses, however, are not machines, and human beings are more than cogs on a wheel. Jaimie Stettin of the House of Beautiful Business pointed out to me that often, people purposefully choose activities because they are inconvenient.
Jaimie Stettin: I write a lot of letters. I used to write a lot of letters. I write them less now.
Jonathan Cook: You mean actually on paper letters?
Jaimie Stettin: I do. I spent a year in which I wrote a letter every day and wrote and sent a letter every day, but yes, paper and stamp letters.
Jonathan Cook: What did you get out of writing a letter that you wouldn’t have with an email?
Jaimie Stettin: Well, you know, mistakes are less simple to correct, mistakes in any sense, and if you change your mind and want to reword something, if you’re writing a letter you have to cross it out or erase it or rip up the page and start again, and in email, no one would see that struggle you’ve had. I think I definitely write differently in a letter with paper and pen and pencil, than I do with email. The tone is a little bit different. My style of writing changes a little. I don’t know how I would describe the differences, but there is definitely a different texture.
Jonathan Cook: A recent set of experiments by anthropologist Dmitris Xygalatas confirms Stettin’s observation, showing not only that people seek out meaningful inconveniences, but that in ritual settings, people can actually experience greater satisfaction, and become more willing to part with their money, when they are suffering.
His studies took place in the island nation of Mauritius, in the Indian Ocean, during the Hindu festival of Thaipusam. Participants in the festival can choose to participate in rituals that include a range of suffering going from merely standing and watching, through walking barefoot on sharp swords and hot coals, all the way up to long ritual processions dragging weights tied onto hooks embedded in the skin, while holding skewers that pierce both cheeks. The research by Xygalatas documented that people who had suffered more not only reported greater feelings of satisfaction at the end of their ritual ordeal, but that they gave more money to their temple as well.
So, in ritual settings, people gain satisfaction after they pay a greater financial cost, travel long distances, and suffer during the process.
This isn’t to say that people seek out suffering, long travel, and high prices at just any time. The key to ritual’s inversion of ordinary interests is its separation from ordinary time. Separation gives the ritual meaning, and transforms hardship into welcome sacrifice.
In our culture, one of the most significant forms of separation we can achieve is separation from digital technology. Once a special tool of electronic transcendence, digital screens have become mundane objects, signs of unwelcome connections to humdrum obligations. Scott Dawson explained to me,
Scott Dawson: I think the technology around us adds to the noise. Given that people don’t like to be bored, given a chunk of time, it’s easy to reach for this, holding a phone. It’s easy to reach for this, and check Instagram, or check to see if you have any new emails since the last time you checked, five minutes ago.
There’s someone I read recently and he conceived of an unreachable day, or an untouchable day, an unreachable day, and took it as an experiment. For one day a week, he was unreachable and all technology went off unless he was using it to write, and notifications went away, the phone was in airplane mode, and he was unreachable, and people knew he was unreachable. He had no appointments. His calendar was completely free. That meant he could write for four hours and he could think for four hours. His fear was that something would be so incredibly important that during his unreachable day, someone who would normally need him couldn’t get him, and that would be a problem. It never happened. The world didn’t fall apart around him.
Jonathan Cook: So, the time we spend in purposeful separation from digital devices can be thought of as a kind of ritual of purification. Digital detox, some people call it. The purpose of ritual is not separation for its own sake, however. As semiotician Martina Olbertova explains, the purpose of ritual is to achieve a greater end, to enable the transformation of identity.
Martina Olbertova You have an identity. That identity is held by the story that you live in and the story that you tell yourself about who you are, and that story is supported by the kind of rituals that you do on a daily basis. So if you want to change who you are you need to change what you do, and basically create a different set of rituals through a different set of conscious actions, but the thing is that in between that, you actually need to rewrite is the story. That’s the narrative of what you keep telling yourself that you are.
Jonathan Cook: To rewrite your own story is a strange thing, and it requires a particular mindset to accomplish it. Mental attachment to our pre-ritual identity needs to be dissolved. This is accomplished through the second element of ritual design: Disorientation.
One manifestation of ritual disorientation comes in a form that members of business culture will be familiar with: The concept of flow as articulated by the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Scott Dawson describes his experience with this mental frame.
Scott Dawson: If I get into, and we can talk forever about flow, if I get into a concept of flow, that means I am really in tune with the work that I’m doing. If I’m solving a design problem, and I can work uninterrupted on that for a really large swath of time, there is something that is really pleasurable that comes out of that process, and you’re not being interrupted by phone calls and instant messages and emails and all that.
Flow as a phenomenon, it’s almost like the front of your mind takes a backseat. I’ve experienced it creatively, with writing, with drawing, with playing music, with designing. You get almost into this tunnel where, if you’re not interrupted, you can be in there for hours. So what kicks you out of flow is a phone call, someone opening the door, interrupting you, something about the process of what you’re doing that gets in the way of you finishing, like an application that gives up the ghost in the middle and says, ‘I have to quit!’ Flow is a beautiful thing, when you can step back after a stretch of being creative, and you have a step back and what you’re looking at is something that didn’t exist before.
Jonathan Cook: To enable the fragile disorientation of flow, Scott establishes ritual boundaries to keep out distractions. These protect him from signals of social, physical, and temporal reorientation. The trick is to willfully forget that there is a world outside of the ritual space, to enter what Scott calls a “tunnel”, within which time slows down, and space contracts, until only that present moment exists. There, in that threshold of disorientation, amazing works of creativity can be accomplished.
With separation and disorientation achieved, one additional element of ritual helps ritual participants to achieve the break from ordinary identity that must take place before meaningful transformation becomes possible. This is the element of ritualized disobedience.
Within effective rituals, ordinary rules are no longer in effect. In their place, special taboos are established. In traditional societies, ritual initiates might be allowed to engage in crude behavior, to steal, or even to engage in acts of violence, within the boundaries of the ritual setting. In compensation, however, they would be required to wear special costumes, avoid saying certain ritually prohibited words, or refrain from eating certain foods.
The act of shopping can be thought of as a system of ritualized disobedience. We don’t see it that way, because we’re used to seeing stores from the time we’re small children. They seem quite ordinary to us, but in fact, they are exceptional places where ordinary rules that restrict our behavior don’t apply, but alternative rules do. In ordinary circumstances, it is not permitted for people to simply enter a room, take whatever objects they like, and leave with them, even if they leave money in compensation. This is a crime called theft… except if we’re shopping in the ritually established boundaries of a store.
One of the most successful manifestations of ritual design within the business setting is the occasional permission given to violate the rules that ordinarily restrict corporate behavior. Corporations may set up skunkworks in order to establish ritually protected challenges to organizational orthodoxy. This sort of ritualized irreverence was described to me by Martin Reeves of the Boston Consulting Group. He and I first met in a parking lot outside of a palace in Lisbon, at an event for the House of Beautiful Business. Martin contrasted for me the biological metaphor and cultural metaphor for business.
Martin Reeves:Metaphors can be helpful when you want to change or challenge your belief set, so textbooks on finance theory and strategy lay out a certain model of how to think about business, and clearly a classical business theory doesn’t work under these circumstances that we’re talking about. And, so, one productive analogy, I think, is biology. I tend to use that one a lot because I really studied biology so I know something about that, and so, that’s the evolutionary paradigm. That’s the area that you, that it’s all about the means not the ends because you can’t plan for a particular result, but you can carry out a process of evolutionary innovation which creates future options which you’re not committed to take, but you can selectively take. So, you inch forward by creating novelty and learning from it faster and more effectively than your competitors. So, biology is a very useful metaphor.
One I use less, but I do use in parking lots in Lisbon, is play and ritual, which you know, is the idea that you can do things that are dangerous or costly in real life, if you create, I think Huizinga said, a sacred space, if you create a space which is marked off by, in some ways, not being real, being ritualized, where you can try things without the full real world consequences. So, just as children will play fight without actually trying to kill each other, you can innovate and try new things without bringing the company down. That’s why I think, in a sense, play and ritual is a ritualized learning through failure, or otherwise known as innovation.
Jonathan Cook: Play fighting is an excellent example of ritualized disobedience. In ordinary circumstances, fighting is a violation of friendship, but within the ritual of play, it becomes a bonding experience. Martin explained to me that businesses that are unwilling to engage in this kind of ritual play with forbidden ideas are more vulnerable to failure.
Martin Reeves: So, we’ve looked at you know what discriminates successes and failures, and there are many factors. There are some very strong patterns, but the biggest is that companies that fail at transformation tend not to have a second chapter. And what we mean by a second chapter is, they tend to stop at short term resource conservation and cost reduction. And so, in a sense, implicitly they’re betting on the hypothesis that you can cut your way to greatness, whereas in the successful cases there’s always a pivot to growth and innovation, which of course requires a totally different philosophy and leadership style.
So, under these conditions of external stress, it’s one of the hardest tests of playfulness, because in a sense, you know, being under threat here is when you are least likely to exhibit playful instincts, but actually, they are most required because you need not only to conserve sources, but need also to grow, and that usually only comes through innovation, and that usually only comes through playfulness and curiosity.
Jonathan Cook: What Martin explained to me was that, although integrating playful ritualization within apparently stable and secure business processes may seem like an extravagance, actually, it is the failure to engage in rituals of cultural maintenance that most quickly depletes an organization. The rules that sustain a corporation can quickly become its greatest vulnerability, because they lead it to behave in predictable ways. Ritualized disobedience reintroduces some play into the structure, allowing for innovation and productive unpredictability.
Martin Reeves: It is a perfectly understandable instinct because if your viability is under threat, and perhaps your job is under threat as a leader, if you’re offered two bets and one of them is an incremental bet on the known, and the other one is a bet with a large variance of outcomes on something totally unknown, and under these circumstances, you’re put under pressure from investors and the numbers are being heavily scrutinized, you’re always going to go for the, on average, the incremental known bet, and actually it may be the right choice in many situations. But obviously, if you pursue that strategy forever, you essentially deplete the company.
So, at some point, there needs to be a relationship between, if you like, the work and the play. I can put it that way. And so, we think that that relationship is that the work pays for the play. In a sense, the conservative measures that are occur in transformations are for the purpose not only of ensuring viability, but for funding the future, and the paradox that these apparently contradictory things need to be embraced at the same time is why transformation is it is very difficult but very, very valuable if you get it right.
Jonathan Cook: As Martin points out, the ritualized disobedience of play re-establishes vitality within a business, enabling unproductive, outdated corporate identities to be recast in more adaptive forms. This is where the biological metaphor that Martin began with comes in.
The elements of ritual we’ve talked about so far provide for a break from the pre-ritual structure, the status quo that prevents transformation from happening. These elements set the stage, but for actual transformation to take place, a higher level of ritual activity needs to take place.
The transformational work of ritual takes place at its height, with the element of symbolic recombination. Within the protection of ritual space, our creative minds get to work, dismantling the material of culture around us into its constituent parts, and recombining it, as gametogenesis recombines DNA, into new symbolic forms of story, of music, and of visual art, as a kind of new cultural code for the identity we seek to inhabit.
Martina Olbertova explains how cultural codes of identity, expressed through mythology, are situated in the everyday rituals with which our identities are maintained.
Martina Olbertova: Mythology wasn’t meant as a highbrow piece of intellectual work. It was meant as, it’s more like in terms of semiotics and looking at myths, and it doesn’t even have to be corporate myth, just the myth as a standalone cultural entity, it’s more about those everyday little rituals and the way that we basically perceive reality as a form of a story. Humans are the ultimate meaning making machines that’s how our brains are wired.
If you look at culture as a sort of prevailing set of shared meanings in a particular society in the present, the way that it operates is that the people of the culture connect to each other like a set of rituals that they carry out every day and repeat. So and in the western societies it could be commuting to work, or consuming, or spending time with loved ones.
Jonathan Cook: It’s easy to think, because it is such an unusual frame of mind, that ritual is something rare, enacted only for very special social occasions. Of course, grand social transformations such as weddings, inaugurations, and funerals are ritually designed. However, we enact small rituals every day – microrituals – in the pursuit of meaning, whether we consciously understand that’s what we’re doing or not.
The drama of mythology, or of the grand stories businesses tell in their advertising, is meaningless to people unless it’s something they can connect to.
Symbolic recombination occurs in the microrituals of everyday life as much as in the macrorituals that more easily seize our attention. It’s just that the scale is different.
Using tools of symbolic play such as Instagram, or Pinterest, or simply a pen and paper, we transform everyday objects into units of meaning, and manipulate them to recast the stories of our lives in a new light. In doing so, we transform in real life. Having cut apart our solid identities into smaller elements that can move within the flow of rituals, we emerge as someone different than the person we had been at the beginning of the experience.
This is the realm of art, not of engineering, but the tools devised by engineers can aid us in our symbolic play. In the ritual act of symbolic recombination, we play with core cultural symbols, editing them, then mixing and matching them together in a kind of collage of meanings that reveals the larger significance of our individual journeys, in metaphorical form.
This frame of mind offers powerful opportunities for businesses, because it’s where true innovation takes place, individually and organizationally. Corporations’ greatest strength is also the source of their greatest vulnerability. They are stable. They’re propped up with stiff skeletons of procedure and precedent. This resilience also makes them resistant to change.
Consumers are the same way. As Charles Duhigg explained in his book The Power of Habit, consumers get stuck in routines and tend not to change their shopping habits. That book documented the behaviorist ideological foundations that justify businesses’ current reliance on data mining and analytics that regard human beings merely as creatures of habit, utterly predictable.
What Duhigg’s analysis lacked was a plausible explanation for change, though the clues were there in the stories he told. People do change their habits in real life, but they do so at times of major identity crisis, such as when they get married, or when they retire from work. Those are the times in life when ritual comes in to play, and ritual is not at all the same thing as habit.
In the beginning of The Power of Habit, Duhigg tells the story of a woman who changes her habits dramatically, but fails to adequately explain how she did so. In fact, Duhigg dismisses the woman’s own experience as she describes it, to see her as a mere creature of habitual routines that can be mechanically re-engineered as easily as a watch.
The woman was suffering from a profound identity crisis, an unexpected divorce, and in response she did something unexpected: She made a pair of pilgrimages to the pyramids in Egypt. She told Duhigg that she was feeling profoundly disoriented there, saying, “It started in Cairo… It was like this wave of sadness. I felt like everything I had ever wanted had crumbled. I got up and knocked over a water jug and it shattered on the floor, and I started crying even harder. I felt desperate, like I had to change something.”
The woman decided to repeat her pilgrimage to the Pyramids, in better health, a year later. When she went home, she lived differently, quitting her addiction to cigarettes, becoming a runner, getting a new husband and a new job.
Duhigg declares that scientists studying the woman’s transformation don’t believe that the pilgrimage to Egypt had anything to do with it. He wrote, “It wasn’t the trip to Cairo that had caused the shift, scientists were convinced, or the divorce or desert trek… Lisa had taught herself how to reprogram the other routines in her life as well.”
And so, the profound experience of the woman, her travel halfway around the world to separate her from her ordinary life, her disorientation and the symbolic break of the water jug, were dismissed. Instead, Charles Duhigg and the scientists he spoke to reduced the woman to a computer running programs that could simply be hacked. In their minds, she became nothing more than a machine. They knew it was true, they said, because they had hooked her up to a brain scanner in a laboratory – months after the woman’s transformative moment.
We do this too much in business. Instead of listening to people, instead of traveling with them in their journeys, we treat them like machines. We scan their data, looking for isolated points of manipulation instead of honoring their whole experience.
Reinhard Lanner does things differently. As Chief Digital Officer at the Austrian National Tourist Office, he doesn’t just track travelers. He’s working with the concept of ritual to reimagine tourism as a ritual procession, honoring their travel as a form of pilgrimage.
Reinhard Lanner: The second thing I mentioned which influenced me a lot was the journey with you about the rituals, and that changed the way I go through the way I go through the world now. When I walk through Salzburg now, I am really observing rituals. I think that will be a fantastic way how to train tourists.
Usually, tourism markets train themselves. They train the management. They train the employees. Nobody trains the tourists, and we have a kind of word I hate, which is called overtourism at the moment. That’s not a nice word, because tourism is about hospitality. Yes, of course, there are some places where we are overcrowded and everything, but in our industry at the moment, we talk a little bit too much about overtourism.
Anyway, to give people an idea about not only how to observe landscape, of not only how to observe attractions, and not only how to experience the interaction with other people, but also how to think about rituals, and how people live today in medieval towns and talk to them and observe their rituals, that is, for a group of people, not for everybody, but that’s a way I think we can create great new value for people who travel the world.
Jonathan Cook: Reinhard provides another element of ritual: Guidance. Under his care, tourists to Austria aren’t merely measured and manipulated for the financial income they bring to the country. They are guided through the process, to understand the symbolic significance of what they’re seeing, so that when they leave, they won’t just have souvenirs to take with them. Reinhard’s work makes people’s vacations into pilgrimages, giving them a sense of meaning in a trip to Austria.
Pilgrimage is a ritual writ large. It’s a physical journey through the world that also traces a metaphorical path of transformation. The journey doesn’t have to move people to a foreign country in order to work as a pilgrimage, however. A commute to work or a trip to a store can follow the same ritual structure, if it’s designed properly.
All journeys have an end, however. In ritual, the ending tests the worthiness of the entire process. The purpose of a ritual, after all, is transformation. So, a final necessary element of ritual is reorientation, to guide ritual participants out of the threshold, into a new, stable identity.
Julia von Winterfeldt, the founder of SoulWorx, provides her business clients with a ritualized course of transformation. Along this journey, she tests their merit, and when they succeed, she provides them with a boon.
Julia von Winterfeldt: I’ve seen positive effects to first frame the whole journey and to know and to give the confidence that the individual will come out of this journey with a knowing, not only about him or herself more deeply, but also a knowing of how this individual can apply him or herself into the world of work in our context. And so, I think it’s very important to frame that to get this confidence particularly to individuals who are still very much in their head that they know there’s a goal there’s something that’s to come out of it at the end of next year, and I know I can stick a sign of my or my door and say I’ve done this, and been there, and I think that’s necessary for many of us. So that’s the first.
The second is also to be systematic in the approach, and particularly as you know we’re entering this window and engaging more with all of this technology and binary sort of world, and when going down this path of unraveling there has to be a system to it and there has to be a clean and workbook, let’s say. And so again it gives stability it gives confidence came in and there’s a program behind this is a step one, step two, step three, to calm our minds to know that someone’s done this before and I can just follow the steps.
Jonathan Cook: The process of ritual works well for business because, although it’s emotional and subjective for the people going through it, it’s also systematically organized. It’s not just a story told in the abstract. It’s a tangible experience with an alternative structure of its own, leading to concrete change of behavior in the end. RItual is actionable.
Julia von Winterfeldt: You’ve explored all these wonderful past memories. You’ve explored your fears and your limiting beliefs. Now, you go into more intuitive world of visioning where you really should be or what it is that you should be bringing to your world of work or your life basically, and allowing the intuitive side, and I like to use meditation that’s not always everyone’s way of accessing the intuitive. It can also be through journaling. It can be through, if you’re more religious, through prayer. So, there are different ways to access that, but I’d personally like to use meditation.
That again gives you and hints to the qualities and ultimately to what unique quality you are bringing into the world and then step four, you’ve gone through all of this data collection, so you’ve collected data through memory lane you’ve collected data through your fears, looking your fears and limiting beliefs. You’ve collected data through an intuitive access, and now you start to put all that data together and you can, it’s amazing that you can now actually see what you yourself are all about, and what you also want to really become in your life. The fifth step is how do I put that into play. How do I execute on that?
Jonathan Cook: The fifth step Julia guides her clients through prepares them to leave her ritual experience ready to re-engage with the professional world. It’s at this step that the rite of passage is truly complete, with the new identity set into place. The final test before her clients can adopt a new professional identity is to understand how the insights obtained through the experience under her guidance are going to be applied.
Ritual design in business isn’t just about a temporary threshold experience. Its power comes in its ability to change what people do by changing who they are at the end.
And now you’re at the end of another episode of This Human Business. Next week, we’ll get more hardcore, getting down to the human experience of the material world as we grapple with the primacy of technology in business culture.
