In this Talent Tales episode, talent.imperative Founder Nicole Dessain had the honor to interview Adam Cochrane, a Senior Product Designer at Zalando in Berlin, Germany.
Adam’s superpower is “thinking in a service mindset” and bringing people together over the customer journey.
Adam’s interest in ritual design stems from his religious upbringing in Australia where he learned how powerful rituals can be in bringing people together and uniting them around a shared vision.
He distinguishes a ritual from a routine or a habit in that the latter is something that you can easily practice like brushing your teeth for example. A ritual on the other hand is marked by intent and it’s something that connects us to a deeper meaning.
Ritual design is being conscious and intentional in crafting those meaningful, repeatable exercises for a community, customers, or employees.
One of Adam’s favorite examples of ritual re-design in the workplace is the birthday book ritual. When it’s someone’s birthday in Germany, traditionally they bring a birthday cake to work. Each co-worker grabs a slice, maybe mumbles “Happy Birthday” and then disappears with their slice of birthday cake. Adam felt that that ritual was a bit lacking and wanted to really celebrate the person and highlight what makes them special and smart. They did that by giving each person a book for their birthday, but then also bought copies for the team and the company library. At the next team meeting, the birthday person would then reflect together with their team on their learning from the book.
One way to go about ritual design is to start by uncovering and analyzing all the rituals in the workplace and asking employees about their needs and wants. You then can prototype, and test select rituals by framing them as experiments that can be tweaked along the way.
As we are switching to new ways of working in a post-pandemic world, Adam encourages us to re-imagine workplace rituals. It’s an opportunity to critically re-examine whether the right people are included in ritual design and whether our rituals are indeed inclusive. Since there is no playbook (unlike with traditional/default rituals), prototyping new workplace rituals and assessing their efficacy monthly becomes imperative.
How to get started with ritual design? Adam recommends experimenting with rituals within your team first and then scale those that might resonate with a broader audience.
Want to learn more about how to integrate rituals into new ways of working? Watch the entire interview on YouTube or listen to the Podcast.