In the Alumni Homecoming weekend, I gave a lecture on workplace culture. Rituals are powerful tools for building a culture that better aligns your values and priorities with your everyday practices. Our work shows how rituals help people bridge transitions, get to flow, deal with conflict, and increase bonding. In this session, we’ll share some of the insights from our work, and scope out some culture experiments to run — harnessing the patterns of rituals to think about lightweight, bottom-up ways to build better ways of meaning-making.

 

In January 2020, we led a design sprint session for the SAP Lab’s Silicon Valley Next Talent program. The goal of the design sprint is to upskill newly hired SAP designers to learn design thinking by doing.

We gave them a relatable design challenge: How might we improve new employee’s onboarding experience? They interviewed each other and created journey maps. Then they picked pain points and opportunity points from their journey maps and create design concepts. At the end of the design workshop, they presented their concepts by enacting them.

 

In Winter 2020 semester,  I ran a ritual design session in Bob Sutton’s Leading Organizational Change class! Students and our partners from Stanford HR were game from the get-go. They created corona-virus friendly greeting rituals, which involved lots of foot-shakes. Later on, they designed rituals that took the boring virtual meetings into totally new directions. Bob just wrote a quick piece about the class: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/leading-organizational-change-15-things-i-believe-now-bob-sutton/

On February 20-22, 2020, Ted Matthews, Kajal Khanna and I led a Stanford d.school class on Ritual Design for Better Workplaces. It’s a continuation of our other ritual design work and research, done within our Ritual Design Lab.

Ritual Design Lab has run many iterations of workplace ritual design workshops with partner organizations including Microsoft, Airbnb, SAP Labs, OneTable, and Norwegian Football Association, and now we shifted our focus on the challenges of burn-out in the workplace.

The class was a 3-day partnership with Kajal Khanna, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Emergency Medicine at Stanford University focused on physician well-being; and Assoc. Professor Ted Matthews, who is the Chair of Service Design at Oslo School of Architecture & Design and who’s research focuses on the potential of ritual for service design.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We got invited by Youtube’s UX team as part of their lunch speaker series. The audience was lively and full of ritual ideas. We ran lightweight exercises probing into the Youtube designers’ values and sketching future culture experiments.

I was one of the speakers at the 2019 Aspen Ideas Festival with Margaret Hagan.  We turned the one-hour session into a mini-design workshop and explored the world of meaning-making with the audience.  Below you will find our abstract and the interview that I’ve given prior to the festival.

Abstract

How do we create a culture that brings out the best in our personal and professional lives? Rituals are powerful tools for building a culture that better aligns your values and priorities with your everyday practices. Our work shows how rituals help people bridge transitions, get to flow, deal with conflict, and increase bonding. In this session, we’ll share some of the insights from our work, and scope out some culture experiments to run — harnessing the patterns of rituals to think about lightweight, bottom-up ways to build better ways of meaning-making.

Interview

Your book, Rituals for Work, explains how creative rituals can make our lives more meaningful — both at home and at work. Can you give an example of such a rewarding ritual?

Yes, one ritual in the book is called “The Small Moments Jar.” It helps teams build a healthy culture by instilling a habit of recognizing contributions of all shapes and sizes. When a teammate does something great – whether it’s helping out on a deadline, giving a great presentation, or bringing in fancy cupcakes – another teammate writes it down on a small slip of paper and puts it in a jar. The jar is emptied regularly, such as at the end of the weekly all-staff meeting.

The Small Moments Jar can be integrated into the team’s day-to-day routine, with a low threshold of what contributions can be recognized. The Jar should grow weekly, with all kinds of small appreciations. This is the back-stock of positive relationship moments that can then be drawn from to keep a team strong. A team can choose to hold a monthly ritual of reading through the jar’s notes.

Who are these rituals for?

These rituals are for people who want to improve their work lives. When we (myself and co-author Margaret Hagan) were working on the book, we approached it as a design project. We identified four personas. First, people who are hired to work on workplace culture. They might be part of operations or human resources. Operations staff run facilities. The HR department is responsible for keeping employees happy and engaged. The second persona is the manager. They lead a team or a project and know the life cycles, ups, and downs, of a team. They also know what it takes to build and maintain a team. The third persona is designers or coaches who work on organization and service design. They help improve or repair an organization’s culture. Our final persona is an informal leader who takes charge and is intentional about improving work-life. This persona is especially exciting. They are the hidden heroes of the workplace, and we want to hear their stories.

What are the ingredients for a good, impactful ritual?

A good ritual has certain ingredients and mechanics. Based on our research and experiments, we discovered the majority of rituals have three ingredients: intention, a contextual trigger, and a ritual flow (beginning, middle, and end). Intentionality makes or breaks a ritual. If you lose the intentionality, it will turn into a mindless and automatic routine. Ritual is always tied to a specific trigger in one’s schedule: before going to bed, Sunday morning, etc. Finally, a ritual has a script: beginning, middle, and end.

A good ritual has a je ne sais quoi quality that differentiates it from the mundane and the obvious. It involves a symbolic prop that helps people invest meaning. A ritual is flexible and evolves over time based on the needs of its participants.

Impactful rituals sync people so they feel a sense of togetherness and flow. To get to this synchronicity, some rituals rely on social technologies, such as sharing food, the use of masks and costumes, and the use of music. Meaningful rituals create emotional energy that moves and elevates people.

Read the rest of the interview on the Aspen Ideas Blog.

In March 2018. I co-led a design sprint with a team made up of DatB members, Student Nutrition Services (SNS), SFUSD, and a senior class at Mission High School in San Francisco. We tackled the challenge of school lunch.

Sprint Setup & Method

First, we worked closely with Angela (Angie) on sprint planning. From the beginning, we wanted to work with students, as well as with stakeholders, using a participatory design mindset. We thought about running the session in one of our DatB members’ offices but realized that the best way to include students and other stakeholders would be to run the sprint in their respective locations. This led us to choose the school and the partner office sites.

Further, while creating the five-day arc and each day’s detailed plan, we blended participatory design with design sprint methodologies. This helped us to understand, in enough depth and breadth, a challenge like school food systems. We also digested prior work that was done by SFUSD and IDEO in 2013 to ensure that our scoping didn’t overlap with it, while also leveraging learnings from the initial implementation. In forming our sprint team, we recruited designers from a diverse set of backgrounds, including SAP, Wells Fargo, Capital One, Stanford Legal Design Lab, and Youtube. The group split into two teams, together with SNS and SFUSD.

On our first day of the sprint, we set a long term goal and measures of success with input from SFUSD and SNS members, thanks to the Start at the End exercise. This served as our north star and motivated us to scope the design sprint, accordingly. Angie set the bar high for our long term goal: creating an equitable meal program for students from all backgrounds. Discussions also led us to define a mid-term goal: shifting perceptions about school lunches. This helped us frame our goal for the sprint: discovering ways in which we can redesign students’ access to food. During the 5 day sprint, teams used these goals as their reference points and checked the direction for their concepts.

Design Sprint Experience

Reflecting back on our experiences from day one through day five, we realized the journey was an evolution of team members from avid learners to hardcore prototypers. The first two days were pure immersion and conversations with stakeholders. The learnings and insights from the first two days fueled the teams to generate fresh ideas and prototypes for the rest of the week. The senior class was engaged in the design sprint- as stakeholders, interviewees, and co-designers (they participated in an ideation session in parallel) who validated and tested the early prototypes.

The two teams had different cadences and backgrounds. Yet, they developed similar concepts at the end of the sprint. Team 1 defined their design principles as abundance, care, and confidence, and they used these principles to guide their design concepts. Team 2 made good use of journey maps to spot the pit moments in coming up with their concepts. They identified agency, food, and cafeteria appeal as their principles and guiding the design concepts.

We asked one of the participants, Laura Pickel, to reflect back on her experience. Here is what she said:

As an educator, I rarely have the luxury of showing up to a workshop and playing the participant role, being able to take the time to dig into the empathy work, unpack it, and try out some solutions. During this week, I was able to embrace my inner designer, and ended the week refreshed, really feeling the impact of design thinking.

Meeting at Mission High School the first day was a great way to ground us in the challenges. It was a pretty barren lunch room, with some good natural light, but not a lot of color. It’s one of the lunch rooms that hasn’t yet been renovated, so it gave us a good sense of the blank slate. Meeting the the high schoolers continued to confirm some assumptions I had already had about the space — that it was not a desirable place to hang out. One student we talked to said he ate in the cafeteria once and hasn’t bothered since. We then got to experience the lunch for ourselves — immersing in the lunch time chaos. The lines were long, the food choices were confusing, the staff was friendly but harried.

The student perspectives and our own experience going through the line were nicely contrasted with Angie’s explanation of SNS’s journey so far. Yes, she said, they understand that the environment of a cafeteria matters. Yes, she said, they understand that they have to overcome the general perception of school lunch as gross, a perception promulgated by not just students within a school, but in media and pop culture.

Our first day was also nicely contrasted by our second day. On our second day, we went to Marina Middle School. At Marina, a school that has already gone through a first round of re-design, the lunch room is covered in color and fun graphics. The seating areas are varied and comfortable. The chaos of lunch is controlled by school staff, and not just the already busy cafeteria staff. While there were still some clear needs for improvement — clarity of food options, increased attention to the presentation of food — it was a clear improvement on the experience at Mission the day before. I was particularly taken with the idea of the vending machine (pictured to the left) and could imagine my middle school self being taken with the idea of getting my lunch from an attractive machine. All of which is brought by companies to the school and makes us ask what trucking companies will pay for cdl training when they have have incredible improvements to their industry.

After being provided each of these unique perspectives — an unchanged lunchroom, a changed lunchroom, and an innovator who has seen these changes through since the origin of the redesign, our team felt ready to dig into creating personas and developing solutions.

Read the rest of the case study on SAP Design’s Medium Publication.