Ritual

"Awareness that you have crossed a boundary allows you to behave differently and ritual reinforces that, as a Catholic entering a church the act of crossing yourself with Holy Water triggers an attitudinal shift to take one example. Boundaries create awareness of difference while gradients can catch us out."

— Dave Snowden (November 2020)

Social rituals, such as marriage or apprenticeship practices, are used to trigger changes in identity and expectation as well as a means of embodiment for habits. Ritual is a method of changing cognitive activation patterns. Habits and associated rituals reduce the energy cost of knowledge and practice acquisition and use. They embody knowledge in such a way that the learning does not have to be repeated time and time again. That also means that they can also be a conservative force; some inhibition of change generally has utility in any human system but too much and we ossify.

If you want people to see the world differently, or behave differently, then ritual is a powerful technique and can shorten the process of habituation. It can also help create an ecology in which good things (some of which cannot be anticipated) are more rather than less likely to emerge.

Concept

Name and History

Since 2008, when Rory O'Connor highlighted the potential use of ritual to change the way we think or perceive the world, considerations around ritual have taken an ever more prominent position in relation to decision support (Snowden, March 2008). Ritual transition rites have started to figure prominently as potentially valuable catalysts for such changes in perspective, especially where they can generate a sense of liminality: of being between no longer here and not yet there.

The whole issue of the symbolic and abstract is central to the field of naturalising sense-making and anthro-complexity. If communication is in part (or possibly in the main) non-verbal, or not articulated then it fundamentally impacts on how we make decisions.

There is some debate in the literature as to the difference between repetitive actions and ritual acts, the argument being that the latter will also contain some symbolic aspect, in the object or what the object means. We tend to the view that they form more of a spectrum. All ritual involves repetition, but while all repetition is habitual it doesn’t follow that habits are per se rituals

Gifting is itself a critical ritual, a recognition of some change of status. It can be a way of belonging, a ritual of entry into a community without expectation of an equal reciprocation. In any organisation, no matter what the size or history, there is a need to recognise any rite of passage for an individual or a team and to mark that in some way.

Identifying rituals

We can now start to look at aspects of rituals, things that help us identify them and make them distinct from day to day mundanity. That includes but is not limited to:

1. Does it require an object?
2. Is there some form of identity story associated (that of itself creates a sense of belonging) with following the process or being given the object, or both?
3. What degree of repetition is needed to establish habit, a form of action which is autonomic in nature?
4. Does said repetition involve some form of symbolic exchange and understanding, something that invests the process with significance? Being given a tool is one thing, making a tool and having it validated by your peers is a different matter.
5. Is there pre-qualification? Are there stages that you go through?
6. Is any exclusion implied or enacted by the ritual and if so is it ethically and/or pragmatically of value?
7. What level of embedded community experience and knowledge is needed to sustain the practice?
8. What would be the cost of creating a ritual, or changing/substituting alternatives?
9. How special is the ritual? What level of reverence is needed?

We now have two dimensions to understand the nature of ritual: (i) the degree of symbolic meaning and (ii) the level of reference, preparation and so on needed to engage.

Creating rituals

Rituals can take many forms, individual or collective, small or large scale. They often involve material objects and physical processes (like walking through a certain space), following a standard choreography of interaction, and frequently facilitate the transition from one change into another, helping to create a novel stage. Rituals can also create connections at scale. The conscious creation of ritual requires an awareness of elements already present in the system that could be ritualised.

The nature of rituals and habits is that in the main they are unarticulated and we need to be aware of that – part of the purpose of mapping is to prevent accidental abandonment. Some things, once lost, cannot readily be restored as they evolved in the first place. Here we aim to codify ritual and habit at the right level of abstraction to allow wider diffusion e.g. their mechanisms (constructors and counterfactuals) that create stable patterns and reduce energy cost and provide various degrees of resistance to change.

Exaptive practice (e.g. SenseMaker®) may be the most effective way to stimulate change in this space, which would mean bringing things together at the optimal level of granularity to allow existing capability to exapt to meet novel needs. Now that of its own right might be a type of habit (e.g. Genba®), and we know from our more general work in this area that abstraction and semiotics are key.

Some things will be only discovered in the act of doing and over time and in community. If that is to be the case we need stabilities (provided by things like ritual) but we also need the capacity to initiate phase shifts in such stabilities, or recognise when one is going to happen anyway. This also means that, as in the apprentice model, we do not want practice to be precisely copied as then it would cease to evolve. The primary thing is that rituals are practical i.e. doing something with your body, so that you enter an identity shift. For example, health professionals may scrub up before a surgery for hygiene reasons but it also creates a mental shift towards the job at hand.

Methods

Ritual is embedded in many of our Cynefin Co methods that aim to understand and change how we identify and think. Methods include:

• Crews: Offer an alternative to traditional teams as a way of ritualising and formalising interactions between predefined roles.
• Entangled Trios: Entangling diverging perspectives leads to a more extensive and comprehensive exploration of issues, ritualises the exchange of knowledge, expanding the space of possibility leading to innovation.
• Aporia: Aporia can be deliberately created to trigger states of suspension in ambiguity through deliberate or managed confusion, so more possibilities can emerge or become visible and to enable different ways of thinking.
• Constraint mapping: This method combines the brainstorming of constraints with their mapping on a time/energy grid that indicates where intervention might be most suitable.
• Ritual dissent: Ritual Dissent is a workshop method designed to test, derisk and enhance proposals, stories, ideas or anything else by subjecting them to ritualised dissent (challenge) or assent (positive alternatives).
• Triopticon: Facilitates resolution of conflict between different bodies of expertise and/or enables a trans-disciplinary synthesis to emerge through a ritualised ‘dance’.
• Sacred story book: This artefact, crafted into a symbol of remembrance, creates ritual and celebration around transition, important after traumatic events, in the form of a beautiful, graphic designed commemorative book of archetypal stories and themes collated from your data.

Related

Principles

• Rituals reinforce habits and trigger or break habitual behaviour. They are particularly useful for institutionalising positive habits.
• Western scholarship on ritual in relation to transition builds primarily upon the work of folklorist Arnold van Gennep, who was particularly noted for his work around three types of rites: preliminal rites (or rites of separation), liminal rites (or transition rites), postliminal rites (or rites of incorporation). Anthropologist Victor Turner built upon upon van Gennep's work and remains critical because of his work linking ritual to Liminality.

Frameworks

• ASHEN

Cases and stories

• Draft teaching stories

References

Articles and books

• Dave Snowden, Creating a More Resilient Ecology to Manage Unimagined (and Potentially Unimaginable) Future Situations, in On Building a Better Future, Nexxworks (2022)
• Terrence Deacon 1998 book, The Symbolic Species
• Shove, Pantzar & Watson’s The Dynamics of Social Practice

Blog posts

• Dave Snowden, Twelvetide 21:01 of habits, The Cynefin Company Blog (December 25, 2021)
• Dave Snowden, Twelvetide 20:06 Narrative appreciated, The Cynefin Company Blog (December 30, 2020)
• Dave Snowden, Keeping the faith?, The Cynefin Company Blog (November 7, 2020)
• Dave Snowden, The use of ritual, The Cynefin Company Blog (March 1, 2008)