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

Ritual communication creates 'sharing, participation, association and fellowship' according to James W. Carey, and this is just what organizations need to do in COVID times. Yet many companies are focused on simple transmission ie. sharing the information and not considering the emotional response. As my daughters showed me this evening with the ritual they created for the passing of the Platy fish, people want events to have meaning beyond words.

In this podcast, I look at the works of Herbert Marshall McLuhan who wrote The Guttenberg Galaxy and coined the term "the medium is the message". I look at how technology itself is changing the underlying uses of communication and how organizations can take measures to establish rituals which define and protect culture.

The irony is that as communication via platforms becomes more tribal (also a McLuhan phrase), it's also becoming less ritualized and more based on the formula for performance.  The final social media send-off of a bin collector after 34 years of service is used to illustrate my view that we need to ensure rituals somehow survive lest organizations end up in the bin.

SPEAK|Pr is for leaders to unlock the value in their organization for free with effective communication and is hosted by international Pr agency owner and entrepreneur Jim James.

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Transcript

Jim James: 0:10

Today, we're going to talk about rituals. I got to thinking abou this, because my daughters and I went to the river to give a send off to a fish which had passed away the other day. Rituals are a really important part of our society. At the same time, they also conform a fundamental part of our corporate communications culture and how we communicate about what matters to us within our organization. Rituals and communication have been in our societies from the very beginning. There was a chap called James W. Carey, who looked at rituals and communication back in the 1940s. 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. Carey defines the rituals as being a way that we try and share ideas and thoughts to encourage participation, association, and fellowship. Certainly, 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. In the same way that we've buried, as I'm sure anybody that's got children will have had this experience, hamsters, rabbits, and other animals, with 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 and eulogies. They've wanted to hold hands as they put the fish into the river. And so for all of us 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 fish being put back into the local river. And so, this ritual reminded me of the need within our organizations to create rituals and how those rituals are not the least because of technology, but also because of COVID and lockdown being threatened. For instance, weddings, birthday parties, and funerals are fundamental societal rituals that are being denied at the moment. Carey also shared a view of communication which he called the transmission view, in which he talks about the dissemination of information as the primary goal. In the ritual, there's a desire to create and share participation, association, and fellowship. But in the transmission view of communication, it's the act of communication which is the primary goal. Carey quotes Marshall McLuhan, who was a Canadian philosopher often credited as being, if you like, the originator of modern media studies. He coined the expression, "The medium is the message," and the term 'global village.' He also predicted the World Wide Web as well as the impact of technology on communication. McLuhan wrote an article in 1962 called The Gutenberg Galaxy where he wrote about communication technology and the beginnings of electronic media, TV and radio, of course in those days. He explained how this affected what he called the cognitive organization. He was actually giving a foresight at the time into the implications for social organizations and societies as a result of new technologies. On Wikipedia, it says he wrote about the new technology extending one or more of our senses to a social world. In other words, it's taking us out of ourselves as we read to ourselves. We have our individual sense of something. McLuhan was writing about how the new technologies would create experiences outside of ourselves, that we would experience those with other people, and that these new shared experiences would have an impact on our culture. He throws this parallel to adding a new note to a musical vocabulary and from that being able to create a whole new melody. 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. 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. McLuhan was talking about how some things that before had appeared lucid may appear then opaque. What had been before a private exploration through reading, for instance, may have become a collective exploration. That may make it seem clearer, because other people are commenting or sharing it. In The Gutenberg Galaxy, McLuhan also said that humankind would move from individualism and fragmentation, like people going off and reading their own books, for example, to a collective identity with a tribal base. We often give Seth Godin the credit for the idea of tribes, but McLuhan had already written back in the 60s about the tribal base, and he coined the term the'global village.' In 1989, James Carey wrote a publication called Communications Culture. This built on McLuhan's assertion and views of the impact of technology on communication. The interesting thing for me is that there's a symbolic production of reality, this idea that we can create reality through rituals and through communication, and that what we're trying to do when we are building societies and organizations is we are creating a sense of belonging. As I watched my two young girls creating a ritual for the passage of a tiny little fish, I was amused to read later on that there is an expression it by Marshall McLuhan that the one thing of which the fish is unaware of is water, 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 behaviour, their association, and part of their relationship with one another and with me and how they view their childhood. When I look at organizations, we are creating, often in an unconscious way, rituals for our organizations, but how often are we now viewing communication as the simple transmission view of communication, where the communication is the goal itself, as opposed to the change in behavior? From a public relations point of view, this is of fundamental importance, because if we're working on communicating for the sake of communicating, the transmission view of communication, then we're not going to create a sense of belonging, a sense of community, a change in behavior, and a collective sense of belonging. Perhaps this is all prompted because this morning, I was looking at a social media post, and there was a picture of a man who worked for 34 years at a company and was in charge of rubbish collection. He was given his own engraved grey wheelie bin with the dates from July 1986 to August 2020 with the hashtag #dontbeastranger and#aboveandbeyond. This made me reflect on what kind of rituals we are now creating for our staff, for our partners, and for our clients. In earlier times, when we were in a society that was less driven by the the technologies and the pace of change and also now the the remoteness due to COVID, we would celebrate and give people a rite of passage or some kind of an event. As we've seen, the rite of passage for this chap who's dedicated 34 years of his life to this company has been now made into a social media post. It made me wonder, is that really going to be something that creates, as Carey was talking about, a sense of sharing, participation, association, and fellowship? Remembering the SPEAK|pr program that we have and the three different audience groups (our clients, our staff, and our partners) that are important for any organization to function, in the previous days, we would have annual get togethers or company outings or even just a simple ritual of ringing a bell if there was something worth acknowleding, like the closing of a deal. These are the rituals that led to what McLuhan would call a tribal base, where people are 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 communication. We have that in churches and community organizations. As we are living now in the new normal of distributed organizations where people are not coming together in the same way, from a public relations point of view, I'm thinking, how do we create this sense of ritual? How do we create that sense of belonging and of the importance of certain kinds of behavior? It brings me back to this activity created by a 10- and 12-year-old who, of their own accord, felt that it was important to to give this little fish his or her own send-off into its next phase of its life. As human beings, we're driven to have some sense of purpose and 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. There are moments in an organization's growth or well-being when it's appropriate to create some kind of ritual. Whatever ritual we do, these become part of our cultural messaging. They become part of what we can share through social media, what we can share for recruitment, what we can share for customer engagement. As we are now looking at PR and our communications being much more distributed, and by all accounts, we'll have lots of clusters or small tribes in distributed areas instead of all gathering in one place, how can we create rituals? Do we need to start to write those rituals down or make videos of them and share them using platforms like Loom or Gather Voices? How can we start to make sure that the tribal element of communication or the ritual is codified and understood by everybody so there's a common sense of purpose and a common sense of what's important? The moral of this story 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 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 we need to be conscious about the role of communication. Is it simply to transmit information or is it to create engagement participation and collaboration? I think great communications ultimately will create information alignment, but with the greater goal of organizational alignment and harmony around those core goals.