Flamingo Cultural Intelligence Salon New Rituals in a Fluid World  

     Flamingo’s Cultural Intelligence practice assembled with four panel members Kate Bussmann, author, A Twitter Year: 365 Days in 140 Characters, Dale Southerton, Professor of Sociology at Manchester University, Peter Ayres, architect with Heatherwick Studio and Andy Gibson, founder, Mindapples and an enthusiastic audience to discuss a central question: are our rituals being eroded or are we creating new ones? Here we have highlighted our 5 big take-outs from the event. Illustrations were created real-time by Danny Burgess.                          

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1. Comfort in chaos

Rituals protect us in a de-stabilised and informalised world  Fear and anxiety grows around economic instability and loss of institutional trust. We can’t keep up with rapid technological change. Our rules, routines, etiquettes and tastes diversify, blur and informalise. In this world fluidity is the norm. And this is why rituals may matter more now than ever as they provide comfort from order, punctuation and an accepted way of behaving. But it is more than a rational patterning of the everyday. Rituals have an eternal quality which take us away from the moment, as Peter Ayres says, ‘binding into the eternal that promises to stretch both forwards and backwards in time.’ In this way a ritual becomes the friction to slow down the present whirl. Regardless of the ever-volatile world around us, we remain anchored to firm ground. As Kate Bussman explained, “ the fear of missing out exhausts us. We need rituals to switch off”.   Brand Takeout: brands can use rituals to give consumers time and space to enjoy experiences and each other more, without it feeling like a disconnection from the world.              

2. Mindfulness enhances the meaning

Both routines and rituals are about repetition, but routine dulls the senses, rituals make them more alive The distinction between ritual and routine comes down to mindfulness. Is going to church on Sunday a ritual or a routine? For panelist Peter Ayres, the answer is simple: “Routine is unthinking and ritual is mindful.” Examples such as the Japanese Tea Ceremony or the way in which the Olympic Park was designed with ‘boundary markers’ like bridges to encourage people to pause and deliberate or turnstiles in football stadia with their familiar audio cues, all have distinct markers or stages which invite some deliberation and therefore enhance the experience. You feel involved and reflective. This chimes with sociologist Richard Sennett’s view in his book ‘Together’ who writes that repetition in music is more akin to ritual than routine because “playing a passage again and again can make us concentrate ever more on the specifics, and the value of the sounds, words or bodily movements becomes deeply ingrained. In rituals the same ingraining occurs”. Brand takeout: Always ask if what you think is your brand’s ritual is in fact a routine. Brands should think of the triggers, cues, markers, bodily movements which invite a more mindful ritual.          

3. The Power of performance

If it’s good enough for the Olympics… The big shift over time is how our rituals have gone from something constructed for us – by religion, timetables, regular patterns to our days – to something we need to create ourselves in order to make sense of the world and enhance our experiences. The panel were unified in their belief that a greater sense of your performance and construction was a hallmark of modern day rituals. Think of the lighting of London’s Olympic Torch – re-invented as a ritual by it’s de-construction, re-construction, lengthening of the performance of its lighting, with more people involved. We can bring the music motif back in here if we think how the Columbian government used the dramatisation of ritual performance to ingrain hand-washing for the public https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlawAUA4OKo Brand takeout: How can your brand enable consumers to create develop their own rituals? Rituals as performance suggests brands can create bigger rituals than their consumption moment or packaging or gestures, think about the practices, infrastructures and communities your brand is part of where rituals could enhance the brand’s role in them.      

4. Feeling part of something bigger than yourself

Transcending the self in secular times    Andy Gibson provoked the audience with an assertion that our rituals are becoming more individual compared to the past where they were more collective. But the response was a concerted belief in the pursuit of belonging as the motivation behind many modern ritualized behaviours. Collective rituals drive both new ways of watching television (bingeing on The House of Cards is a way for us to construct shared spaces of intimacy) as well as keep traditional live TV viewing buoyant. “Ritual is about losing yourself to something bigger which in our individualistic society has real currency;” said one guest, “Surely the word ritual implies a transcendence of the self,” says another. Brand Takeout: examine whether your brand’s ritual is about helping people feel part of something bigger rather than a gesture aimed at a solo experience, making you think of the brand rather than other people.                  

5. A healthy distraction

Rituals to construct the narrative of our lives   When Dale Southerton reminded us we were all destined for death, the audience and panel gasped. We all know this fact, but we all do our best to distract ourselves from it. “We need to construct rituals to create a narrative so that we can survive.” So we use rituals as a self-management tool to enable us to get through our days, weeks and years until we reach the inevitable. But far from being depressing, this is perhaps what makes rituals such a rich topic. Because as Andy Gibson explains, “We aren’t all rational beings looking for the fastest way to get from cradle to grave, we’re all mad, and we live our lives through a series of bizarre rituals.” Whether shared or individual, mindful or habitual, passive or active, meaningful or banal, it’s these funny little quirks that make it all so interesting. As one audience member says, ‘Ritualistic behavior is anti-efficient, it’s for its own sake and for that reason, flies in the face of the time demands of culture.’ Brand Takeout: Learn from Gibson’s Mindapples, with their 5 a-day model for mental health, helping individuals pinpoint rituals that encourage wellbeing. What parts of life and culture are legitimate spaces for your brand to create rituals in to enhance the narratives of our lives?

A final thought… Rituals go bad. They go stale. They can become conservative and the norm. At their worst they can oppress. In many emerging markets, the erosion of traditional rituals which bind people represents progress. The final lesson for us all: keep rituals fresh.

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