Episode 442: Michael Norton
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Enhancing Community and Connection with Rituals
What if the key to managing stress and finding meaning lies in the simple rituals we perform daily? How can engaging in rituals can be a potent tool for combating anxiety and fostering a sense of community?
Michael Norton is the Harold M. Brierley Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School and an author. His latest book is titled The Ritual Effect: From Habit to Ritual, Harness the Surprising Power of Everyday Actions.
Greg and Michael discuss Michael’s groundbreaking research on the distinctions between rituals, habits, and compulsions, and delves into how these practices—whether ancient or self-created—provide essential structure and purpose in our lives.
Michael and Greg dive deeper into the impact of rituals within organizations and relationships. Learn how companies can use simple, coordinated actions to bolster unity and core values, and why rites of passage are crucial for marking life's transitions. Michael also highlights the strong correlation between shared rituals and relationship success, emphasizing the importance of mutual participation.
*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*
Episode Quotes:
Do successful companies leverage rituals to foster a sense of belonging and a common purpose?
24:45: Very often, the rituals that companies have are really intended to reflect a specific value that the company cares about. I was just talking to someone who told me at their company, what they do is every Friday: It's a smallish company, so they have an all-hands every Friday, and each group says something that another group did that they're grateful for. Somebody on another team helped me out with this thing I was working on, and they do it every Friday. Now, they could do anything—they could say, "Think of another group that made you laugh this week. Tell us about that." But they don't laugh; they do gratitude. And they're trying to show in that moment one of the things that we care about in this place is helping and gratitude. You can have a silly mission statement that says, "Gratitude and all these platitudes," or you can use these kinds of regular rituals to show repeatedly: This is the value that we really care about. And families, when they have rituals at dinnertime as well, they're very often communicating a value that they really think is very important.
Rituals can bind us and separate us
23:52: It's not that you do rituals and it's all warm and fuzzy; it's that they can bind us together and they can separate us from other people. So there's tension—it's like a risk-reward kind of relationship with ritual.
Exploring how emotions drive action
17:18: I think the way that humans are built, unfortunately for us, is that we can't change our emotions when we feel like it. So, in other words, it would be amazing if I felt sad, if I could snap and be happy, just automatically, just instantly; we could easily be built like that.
Do we customize rituals according to our needs?
08:17: In fact, even in our own lives, we're changing them—rituals—all the time. And the reason I say that is because if they stop working for you, you could say, "Rituals obviously don't work. I'm never doing them again." Or you can say, "I must have the wrong ritual. It seems what people are likely to do is say, 'I must have the wrong ritual.' Let me mix it up a little bit and see if that will help." And it really, to me, speaks to how deeply ingrained they are in us because we are, in a sense, ignoring evidence from the world that not all of them work, and we continue to do them, modify them, and shape them as though if we keep doing that, we'll get to the optimal one.