Transforming How We Transition
An invitation and recipe book for how to create meaningful ceremonies.
A family photo stained by time and coffee, a research paper’s results section, and a river rock from our first date were just what we needed to begin the rest of our lives. My husband and I watched as our builder, George, poured cement over these sentimental items that lined the foundation of our house. Moments before, we made commitments about the values we’d bring into this new home, laying each memory into cinder blocks one by one.
My fascination for ceremonies began during my anthropology degree, where I marveled at the archeological discoveries of events dated 70,000 years ago. It blew my mind that in a time where survival was a luxury, our distant relatives valued expressing important moments enough to spend precious energy on intangible gains. This practice is so foundational to what it means to be human, in fact, that archeologists have uncovered some form of ceremonial expression in cultures throughout history and across the world.
Hominid Blues: We’re pretending we’re okay living a life of monotony, and we’re not even fooling ourselves
Fast forward to present day — the last few years have been a whole new breed of weird. We’ve collectively delayed gratification in meeting our needs, questioned the role we want work to play in our lives, wondered why we feel stuck, and taken measures to prepare for an impending recession. If we’re not careful, time will be marked only by the closing of project plans and fiscal calendars. Consider this an animalistic cry to bring back the power of ceremonies into where you spend most of your waking (and often for me, sleeping) lives: work. A setting that, “is completely devoid of magic,” one leader shared, or as another employee observed, “I can be in two meetings muted at once, not listening to either, and no one cares.” Marking moments with ceremony is a meaningful way to WAKE UP your culture, to feel connected to one another, to exhale, to be human in the mess of things.
Marking Moments that Matter
Though there are many ways “rituals” can exist at work, ceremonies I’m referring to here are experiential events that mark important landmarks in time. They send a clear signal that the lives, values and transitions colleagues experience matter. All of this talk of The Great Resignation makes me wonder how work ceremonies could play a role in creating a culture of belonging when the stakes are high and the outcomes are uncertain.
At work, ceremonies could be created for things like:
Organizational change: M&As, reorgs, leadership transitions
Team transitions: project initiation or closure, experimenting with a new process
Employee lifecycle moments: onboarding, promotion, taking leave, turnover, etc.
“Wow, that M&A was spectacularly executed” [said no one’s wildest dreams]. A common recipe for rolling out big scale change looks like this: an executive makes an announcement to a sea of videos-off Zoom screens, behind which everyone else addresses their fears over text. A loose “why” like, “This sets us up for a successful future,” is offered. Hard feedback is left unsaid. No questions are asked. Hundreds of hands click “Leave Meeting.”
But what if we designed space for the challenging emotions inherent in change to exist? I was inspired by one leader who held a weekly “Ask Me Anything” meeting during a reorg and planted painfully raw questions in the corporation's engagement survey to publicly show his willingness to address grief. He asked for a one-word emotion for how people were feeling before and after each session and adjusted his approach for what behaviors moved the needle. He showed up. So did hundreds of employees. He was a leader worth following into change.
The word “ceremony” may be one too many woos on a scale from 1-woo woo for you. Your team might choose to call it something else: commemoration, celebration (though not all ceremonies are for jubilant occasions), ritual, milestone markers, reflection. Whatever you choose to call it, I’ve learned that facilitating components from this recipe consistently creates memorable experiences:
Time: Speak to the past, present and future around the topic
Movement: Relocate physically or mentally to a place that feels special and relevant
Symbolism: Create meaning out of objects or symbols that drive a message home
Give and Take: Imagine there’s an invisible pot where anyone that’s involved gives something and receives something as a way to create a shared experience.
Surprise: Unexpected offerings help everyone stay present and make the memory stick
Human-centricity: Tailor the approach to preferred work appreciation languages, adapt tone from serene to playful depending on person/context, be thoughtful about who’s invited and what their role is, and design to elicit a specific emotion.
At Stoked, we’ve leveraged ceremonies as a way to mark the start of something, an important transition, or a closure for individuals or teams.
Mark the start of something
Lauren Lee challenged us all to honor important moments in her newsletter before entering maternity leave this year. Our team surprised her on her last day with a customized meditation, and we gifted her a resource she could come back to throughout her leave for affirmations, self-care resources and reminders of how her incredible talent inspires us to do great work.
Mark a transition
One of our incredible partners, WAP Sustainability Consulting, is creating a culture radically dedicated to leveling up their work. To celebrate how their team is using storytelling in their deliverables, we led a virtual Dundie Award Ceremony themed around the show The Office. We gave out awards for employees who challenged norms with new ways to inspire their audience to take action on their sustainability goals. We even had a special guest star share a few words….
Mark a closure
We worked with a global team at Alight to develop ways for their direct service providers to share how they’re creatively meeting the needs of those experiencing displacement. To mark the closure of the first phase of the project, we live-streamed J.T. Brown’s music from the United States to a refugee camp in Rwanda as a way to acknowledge the team’s creativity within resource constraints and love of cross-cultural music.
Creating a beacon to come back to
Day 1 in our new home!
When my husband and I feel distanced from our families overseas, or we’re finagling our finances to prepare for impending economic strife, we revisit the values we committed to on the day of laying our home’s foundation. We will never see the items we embedded into the bedrock of our house again, but we know that our walls are lined with intention marked by ceremonious reflection.
How can you embed intention into the walls of your organizational culture?
Check out this resource for designing your own work ceremony! Included is a demo of a ceremony for the Stoked team to mark a transition in our journey incubating new businesses.