Does your organization create rituals which generate participation and fellowship? Here's why it sh

Hello and welcome to this episode of Speak PR. My name is Jim James, and this is the podcast for anybody who's leading an organization that believes there's value to be unlocked in the organization if you could just share that with the stakeholders. And I do that through a combination of tools and tips and technologies that I know work because I've run my own public relations group for over 25 years. I've also set up companies on 3 continents. Today, we're going to talk about rituals. And I'm thinking about rituals because tonight my daughters and I went to the river to give a send-off to a fish which had passed away very sadly this evening, just before dinner. Now, rituals are a really important part of our society, but they also can form a fundamental part of our corporate communications culture, and also how we communicate about what matters to us. Within our organization. Now, rituals and communication is something that obviously has been through our societies from the very beginning. Now, there was a chap called James W. Carey who looked at rituals and communication back in the 1940s, and he wrote a seminal piece called A Cultural Approach to Communication. And he delineates communication into two main views. He calls them rituals and transmission communications. Now, Carey defines the rituals as being a way that we try and share ideas and thoughts with a view to encouraging participation, association, and fellowship. And certainly tonight with my two daughters who were insistent that we would take the fish down to the river. Near where we live and put it back to where it may have once have come from. We were looking to create a moment for the girls of letting something go, something they'd spent time going to the shop to buy, to bring home, to care for. And in the same way that we've buried, as I'm sure anybody that's got children will have had this experience, we've buried hamsters, we've buried rabbits, we've buried kind of a number of animals over the, over the last decade. And each one of them, it's been interesting to see how the children have wanted to create a ritual. They've wanted to create crosses, they've wanted to create eulogies, they've wanted to hold hands as they put the fish into the river. And so for all of us that have got children and that have experienced this, we see how early There is a desire to create some kind of moment that defines this change that's taking place from life to death and the passage of this little tiny platy fish being put back into the local river. So the ritual that the girls created and have created in the past reminded me really of the need within our organizations to create rituals and how those rituals are, not least because of technology, but also because of COVID and lockdown, being threatened. The number of times that I've heard people have not been able to attend, for example, funerals or weddings. These are fundamental societal rituals that are being denied at the moment. Now, Carey also shared a view of communication which he called the transmission view. And in the transmission view of communication, James W. Carey talks about the dissemination of information as the primary goal. So in the ritual, there's a desire to create sharing, participation, and association and fellowship. But in the transmission view of communication, it's the act of communication which is the primary goal. Now, Carey quotes Marshall McLuhan, who was a Canadian philosopher who lived from 1911 through to December 1980, who was a Canadian but studied philosophy at Cambridge in 1942, and McLuhan. Is often credited as being, if you like, the originator of modern media studies. He was the person who coined the expression, the medium is the message, and the term global village. And he predicted the World Wide Web, but also he started to predict the impact of technology on communication. He wrote an article in 1962 called The Gutenberg Galaxy, And in this piece, he wrote about how communication technology— and at the time he was writing about alphabetic writing and the printing press, Gutenberg, and the beginnings of electronic media, TV, radio, of course, in those days— he was explaining how this was affecting what he called the cognitive organization. So he was actually giving a foresight at the time into the implications for social organizations and societies to the result of new technologies. And I think it's worth, you know, with credit to Wikipedia here who have explained this in his article, he wrote about the new technology extending one or more of our senses to a social world. In other words, taking us out of ourselves. As we read to ourselves, we have our individual sense of something, and McLuhan was writing about how the new technologies would create experiences outside of ourselves and that we would experience those with other people. And that these new shared experiences would have an impact on our culture. And he draws this parallel to adding a new note to a musical vocabulary, and that being able to create a whole new melody. Now, the view then was that if there is a new form of technology, it creates new types of senses, and that these new senses can alter our culture because they change how we experience events. They can change how we experience a ritual, for example. But as we know, the new technology has fundamentally changed the way that we have a transmission of information. Where if the primary goal of communication is the transmission of information, technology transforms that experience entirely. And he was talking about— McLuhan was talking about how some things that before had appeared lucid may appear then opaque, because what had been before a private exploration through reading, for example, may have become a collective exploration And that may make it seem clearer because other people are commenting or sharing. Now, what McLuhan was also saying in this Gutenberg Galaxy paper of 1962 was that humankind would move from individualism and fragmentation— we can all think about people going off and reading their own books, for example— to a collective identity with a tribal base. So we often give you know Seth Godine the the credit for creating this idea of tribes, but McLuhan had already written back in the sixties about the tribal base, and he coined the term of the global village. So James Carey in 1989 wrote a publication called Communication as Culture, and this really built on the McLuhan's. Assertion and views of the impact of technology on communication. And the interesting thing for me is that what we've got in this idea is that there's a symbolic production of reality. This idea that we can create reality through rituals, and we can create reality through communication. And that what we're trying to do when we are building societies and organizations is that we're creating a sense of belonging. Now, as I watched my 2 young girls this evening creating a ritual for the passage of a tiny little platyfish, I was amused to read later on that there is an expression by Marshall McLuhan That the one thing of which the fish is unaware of is water, because the point being that we are creating a reality without even really being conscious of the fact that we're doing that. What I mean by that is that my children were not conscious today of creating a ritual which will be part of their behavior and part of their association, also part of their relationship with one another and with me and. How they view their childhood. But what I also realize, of course, when I look at organizations, is that we are creating, often in an unconscious way, rituals for our organizations. But actually, how often are we now viewing really communication as the simple transmission view of communication, where the communication is the goal itself, as opposed to the change in behavior. Now, from a public relations point of view, of course, this is of fundamental importance, because if we're working on communicating for the sake of communicating, the transmission view of communication, then actually What we're not going to create is the sense of belonging, the sense of community, but also the change in behavior and collective sense of belonging. Now, perhaps this was all prompted because this morning I was looking at a social media post, and there was a picture of a of a man called John McCormick, who's worked 34 years at a company. Called MGB here in the UK. And I guess he's been working in collections, in rubbish collection, and he was given his own engraved grey wheelie bin with the dates from July 1986 to August 2020. And with the hashtag, you know, don't be a stranger and above and beyond. And I just was reflecting, I suppose, on what kind of rituals we are now creating for our staff, for our partners, and for our clients. And in earlier times, when we would have perhaps a society that was less driven by the technologies and the pace of change, and also now the remoteness due to COVID, We would celebrate and give people a rite of passage, some kind of an event. And as we've seen, the rite of passage for this chap, John McCormack, who's dedicated 34 years of his life to this company, presumably with these wheelie bins, has been now made into a social media post. And is that really going to be something that creates, as Kerry was talking about, a sense of sharing, participation, association, and fellowship? So it seems to me that now, as we look at our internal communication, but also communication with our partners and with our clients, remember in the Speak PR program that we have, we talk about the 3 different audience groups that are important for any organization to function. In the previous days, we would have maybe an annual get-together or the award of a prize or a company outing, or even just the ritual of ringing a bell if there has been, for example, a sales success. These are the items. These are the the rituals that led to what McLuhan would call a tribal base, where people were having shared experiences, but more than just seeing communication as simply the transmission of information. There was a time perhaps where this tribal base was being brought together with a ritual, a ritual communication. We have that, of course, in churches. We have that in some larger organizations. We have that in some community organizations. As we are living now in the new normal of distributed organizations where people are not coming together in the same way, I'm just starting to think from a public relations point of view, how do we how do we create the sense of ritual? How do we create that sense of belonging? And of the importance of certain kinds of behavior, and the reason that I believe that that's important comes back to this this activity this evening created by a ten and a twelve-year-old who of their own accord felt that it was important to to give this little platy fish his own or her own we never did know his or her own send-off into. its next phase of its life. So as human beings, we're driven to have some sense of purpose, to have some sense of meaning, but also to share that. The children didn't want to go on their own. They wanted to go together, and we took Binky the Beagle as well. So there are moments in an organization's growth or wellbeing, or even it's a contraction, When it's appropriate then to create some kind of ritual. How we do that, whether it's like the military create a passing out parade, universities have graduation ceremonies, companies when they sell, for example, the X 100 millionth unit will perhaps celebrate with the customer. But from a public relations point of view, these rituals become part of our cultural messaging. They become part of what we can share through social media, what we can share for recruitment, for example, what we can share for customer engagement. So I'm thinking about this because as we are now looking at our PR and our communications being much more distributed, and by all accounts the future will have people not coming together in large numbers in one central place, but we'll have lots of clusters, lots of cells, lots of small tribes again in distributed areas. So how can we look at creating rituals? And then do we need to start to write those rituals down or to make videos of them and share them using a platform like Loom, for example, or Gather Voices? How can we start to make sure that the tribal element of communication, which is the ritual, how can we ensure that the ritual is codified and understood by everybody so there's a common sense of purpose and a common sense of what's important? Now, the moral of this story this evening is that communication with technology is fundamentally transformed by the technology itself, but the human condition is not. The human condition still means that we are quite often unaware that the technology we're using is impacting our way of communicating, just in the same way that the fish is unaware of the water. The medium that we communicate in and that we communicate with fundamentally affects the message that we can share. So if we have some consciousness about the role of communication— is it simply to transmit information, or is it to create engagement, participation, And collaboration. And I think great communications ultimately will create information alignment, but with the greater goal of organizational alignment and harmony around those core goals. So thank you for listening to this episode of Speak PR. My name is Jim James. Please do subscribe, share this podcast with anyone you think that might find it of value. And check out our website eastwestpr.com where we have the SPEAK methodology all written out, including some free downloads of some tools and tips that anybody can use to manage their own public relations. Thank you so much for listening, and until we meet again, I wish you the best of health. I wish you a profitable business and that you keep on building some rituals.