Rituals and Habits

Today I declare the birth of a new discipline: Attention Management. For an organizational change practitioner attention management may be more important than the management of time, manpower and money. It’s about shifting the attention to the stuff we take for granted, i.e.: the rituals and habits that protect people’s comfort zones.

You may think of rituals as an exotic thing from distant cultures and  weird religious communities. Well, it is; and to the same extent it is intimately woven into the way we live our daily lives. Rituals occur wherever more than one person are doing something together. That is: in tribes, religions, countries, monasteries and clubs; but also at work, in families and between partners.

Rituals

We all need rituals. A ritual is a way of shaping reality so you can deal with it. And if you and your community fellows have that thing in common it becomes a distinctive feature of your community. The most obvious examples include visual appearances: Aboriginals have white body paint, doctors wear white coats,  etc. On National Geographic we can see how boys become hunters through a manhood ritual. Where I live, marriage is a ritual declaring monogamy and the bride wears a white dress.

The less obvious examples include: making PowerPoint slideshows for whatever you want to communicate at work, but not at home (thank God!). Also: budgeting discussions and the complete cycle of a fiscal year. Coffee, KPI’s and Balanced Scorecards (they are the Nirvana of a tribal belief in numbers), New year, wearing a tie on certain occasions, casual Friday and not wearing a tie, etc.

When looking at exotic or ancient cultures we tend to talk about rites and symbols as if we are way more civilized than that. However, in our day-to-day lives, rituals are far more abundant. We have rites and symbols of all kinds. We only have different names for them. In our world we call them agreements, rules, legislation, organization, structure, strategy, common sense, logic, etc.

Habits

A habit is the same as a ritual, but on the individual level. It’s how we deal with reality. We do certain things our own way. Little things. And it’s the sum of a million simple things a day that give us a sense of security and identity. Habit is the daily victory of forgetting that the nature of reality is unpredictable and groundless. It’s never the same river twice, but through our habits make it so. We would go crazy if we were to approach reality without rituals and habits.

Addictions

An addiction is a habit exposed in a socially unacceptable way. This is where habit clashes with ritual. In my opinion an addiction has very little to do with what is good or bad for you, for good and bad are measures set by ritual. Get it?

Attention

I’m sure you can think of another million rituals and habits we use in our world. In fact, not an hour goes by without us shrinking whatever is happening around us to a digestible taste, size and portion by means of ritual, habit or addiction.

There are several ways to become aware of this mechanism:

• Listen to children: It just takes the fresh look of a child to ask “Why?” (around the age of three) or the sense of independence to say “So?” (around the age of eight) from time to time;
• Connect with weird people – the complete outsiders in rank and order of your community: those from a profession or culture you would otherwise never connect with. Of course, ‘weird’ is a definition defined by rituals ;
• Limbo: when you are involved in a change that drastically changes the course of your life. For example when a person close to you deceases, or when you lose your job;
• Read all of Dr Suess books, especially The Sneetches.

Takeaway

The takeaway for organizational change managers is quite important. The first thing you bump into whenever you want to implement an organizational change is inertia caused by rituals and habits.

Instead of labeling them as ‘resistance’, we’d better approach them with respect, because they define the very boundaries of people’s comfort zones.