Jonathan Cook explains how rituals drive identity transformation and behavioral change in business. He argues rituals aren't obsolete but fundamental to human nature, observable even in animal mating behaviors. Without intentional rituals, companies lose the mechanism that aligns employee and consumer identities with desired actions.
Chapters
Thank you very much. So Jonathan, I'm just going to let you begin the conversation. And I think we talked about starting with a couple of questions on setting the context. So the first one would be, what are rituals in business? So defining what you truly mean. And then why is lacking ritual a threat to businesses? And how can they overcome it? And then we'll see where that takes us.
Thank you. And I'm really glad to see you all engaging in such important questions when it comes to ritual. A ritual is one of those things that invites questions because it's a closed-off space that isn't open to everybody. And by being not open to everybody. It becomes more special to those who participate. So I'm a researcher and consultant, and I specialize in exploring what you might call the unquantifiable aspects of commercial culture. These things like beliefs, emotions, mythologies, symbolism, and ritual. Kind of the subjective experience of it all, the things that no ruler can ever reach. And so the way that I look at ritual is through an anthropological lens. And you're absolutely right, Matt, that ritual is a word that can mean many things. So for psychologists and in the practice of medicine, for example, a ritual is regarded as an unnecessary or repetitive behavior. It can be pathological. And for other people, ritual is a mere habit. It's something that you do without understanding what you do. But from the point of view where I'm coming from, it is intricately connected to meaning, and it's doing that through giving us a place where we know that we stand, where we know who we are and who we stand with. It's about establishing communities. As was mentioned in terms of organizational culture, Hilton, it's absolutely essential. And that's why Matt, our first Matt, he brought up a really important point. Is ritual a thing of the past? I don't think that it is because we can have an industrial revolution and we can have a digital revolution and all of that until we are uploaded onto a mainframe somewhere. And I don't believe that that's going to happen because we're much more complex than the technologists give us credit for. We will remain human and ritual is part of humanity. In fact, it predates our humanity. So biologists will take note of animal rituals. For example, when you have two wild animals, maybe who haven't seen each other before, let's say two tigers out in the jungle encountering each other, and they want to mate. They don't just go right at it because they're both interested. They go through a process, and it's an important process of identity transformation. Which is what ritual is really all about, because they have to change from the sort of tiger who is a loner and gets into fights with other tigers when they meet in the forest to, you know, one who is maybe willing to mate. There's a process that they go through, and there are all kinds of animals that do this. Even insects with as tiny little nervous systems as they have engage in ritualized behavior. It becomes different when it's human, because we really get into a much more complex culture than what animals are capable of. But that essential piece of identity transformation and interacting with others to make sure that we know how our identities relate, that's at the core of it. So I define ritual as a symbolic behavior. That enables the transformation of identity, which results in the change of behavior. And change of behavior is really what it's all about in business. You know, we can communicate all we like, and it's very pretty and eloquent, but if it doesn't result in behavioral change, it really doesn't accomplish much of anything that's useful for business, either in marketing or in organizational kinds of behaviors. So
