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I share ideas on how we work, learn and manage. This time we’ll focus on:

• Ceremonies dictate how we behave - especially hidden ceremonies.

• Three highlights: How to decide if you should give up, how to measure success and the ideas that the tech industry has been silencing.

• A forbidden island and a great AI image generator.

Enjoy,

Avy

Tradition… tradition

A prime minister disembarks from their plane, slowly. On the other side, the president of the other state awaits, poised at a designated spot. They meet, perhaps give each other a formal greeting, shake hands and smile for the cameras. Around them, soldiers of some kind are standing, motionless. Maybe the two leaders are friends: if so, why does their meeting have to show so little emotion? And if they are not friends: why do they have to fake affinity?

At the olympic ceremony for the Judo winners we saw on the podium the Israeli sportswoman, who had won silver, gently remind the Brazilian gold medalist to smile. We can hear her saying "Smile, they are rewarding you!".
But the Brazilian wants to live the moment in another way: not with joy, but with solemnity. Perhaps with pride. Why isn’t she allowed to do so?

Our obsession with refinement, or as we like to call it in organizational settings, optimization, has led us to seek the most appropriate protocol for every experience. We call them protocols, but they really are ceremonies.

Who needs a ceremony?

A ceremony is a vehicle, a strategy: it's deployed in order to achieve a goal. A few examples:

• A rite of passage (a college graduation, a Bar Mitzvah, a driving test) has a clear goal: set a dramatic deadlineto stimulate the individual to advance their own development.

• A sports award ceremony wants to celebrate those who played well and incentivize the other players to try harder.

• A wedding ceremony wants to make the union public, so to motivate the spouses to commit to each other, and family and friends to support the new couple.

Every ceremony is made up of traditional symbols, practices, and roles: as the Fiddler on the roof famously said, "so that everyone knows who he is and what God expects him to do." In non-spiritual settings we can just replace "God" with the community, the team, or the CEO.

Some ceremonies are practiced informally, yet they are not less significant: we might not see them as ceremonies, but we end up behaving just as the protocol requires.

An example: feedback meetings are the most popular organizational ceremony.

Hidden ceremonies and forced ceremonies

Like any other ceremony, feedback meetings require ritual preparations: an official invitation with formulaic texts ("consider this an opportunity for professional growth"); there are elements of forced introspection ("how would you rate yourself...?").

When we get to the meeting there is a classic ritual - the traditional "Shit sandwich": first I’ll praise you, so that I can then spit on you all the things you do wrong and possibly a few passive-aggressive comments on specific details that annoy me, and then I will end with praise again, so as not to end the conversation on a bad note. Praise-Poop-Praise.

The employee, on their side, has to stick to their own script: being thankful, write down notes to show that they care, etc. The whole thing ends with a ritual closure: a politely written summary and thank-you messages.

It’s a ceremony, with clear roles, symbolic protocols and ritual practices. As an employee, you can’t escape it, and you have little room to behave differently than prescribed.

What happens to the individual who has to take part in the ceremony but does not want to? They may find themselves caught in a tug-of-war between compliance with the expected behaviors and their internal desire to voice their genuine thoughts and feelings. Everyone wants me to smile, but I want to shout my dissent. What do I do?

Intentional disruption

My hypothesis: We have engineered moments that require deep thinking and profound interpersonal connection into technical processes with pre-packaged meaning - ceremonies - in order to avoid the possible conflicts and changes that they may trigger.

This dynamic becomes more complex over time: older generations want to perpetuate the ceremonies they grew up with, because their loss would mean giving up on practices that, for them, hold a meaning. Yet, every new generation will embrace the meaningful ceremonies and abandon those that became an overcomplicated series of acts and words. 

How can we shape and reshape ceremonies then? How do we choose the moments that must be engineered in order to stay meaningful? When do we choose to dictate that everyone should follow a script, instead of allowing them to behave authentically - and when should we release everyone from playing a part?

There’s no quick fix, but here are a few thoughts:

• Immersion in a ceremony can be an opportunity to observe ourselves and learn: what do we learn from the way we react to this setting?

• When we understand what that ceremony is, we have a choice: follow it, or disrupt it. Both options can be good; it depends on our goals.

• We can follow a ceremony to the letter, because it can help us gain status, satisfaction, a raise. If we feel detached or disillusioned, we can try to challenge or disrupt the ceremony to make them meaningful, or more effective. We can decide to go against the protocol to intentionally make a point, open up a difficult conversation that otherwise would not happen, or offer an alternative approach.

Ceremonies are not meant to be blindly followed, but to trigger a deeply personal assessment and decision making process: there is a reason why someone decided to set up some rules. Does playing along advances my values and goals, or should I find a creative way to challenge the framework?

I am Avy Leghziel, an organizational consultant and trainer with a knack for unorthodox ideas. This is what I do.
If you want to have a chat, reach out here. I’d love to connect.

Three ideas to play with

☞ 1 Good reasons to be stubborn and good reasons to give up

Paul Graham, the guru of modern entrepreneurship, makes a clear distinction between being persistent and being obstinate.

It’s not semantics. It’s a profound difference between two journeys: those who succeed because they don’t give up when everything is against them; and those who fail because they didn’t give up when they realized that all the odds are against them. Read more here.

☞ 2 Athens, Jerusalem and Silicon Valley

One of the most interesting thought pieces I have read lately.

We give all the attention and resources to technical disciplines: tech, sciences and the like. We convinced ourselves than the other disciplines, in comparison, have little value: philosophy, spirituality, the arts. Nice to have, nothing more. The article points at all the reasons why that’s a catastrophic approach. Read more here.

☞ 3 We can’t use Amazon’s metrics, but we can learn from Amazon how to measure

Every single time I ask a team what is their desired outcome, an embarrassed silence falls onto the room. They can show off lots of numbers and fancy presentations, but they can’t explain rationally why those numbers mean that they are on the right track.

I am not into glorifying measuring. But if we can’t define success and metrics that show clearly what are our chances of achieving success, our strategic decisions will only be… educated wishes. Amazon’s approach provides great guidance to start making clarity. Read more here.

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Unrelated

A family is preventing anyone to reach their forbidden island. What are they hiding?

One more thing

Most AI-based image generators are difficult to master, very limited to use or repetitive. I started using Leonardo.ai, and it’s simple, rich with intuitive features and has a generous free plan. Not a sponsor.

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