Keeping It Fresh

In my last blog post, I talked about incorporating your Fundamental of the Week into rituals that are already established in your company as an easier way to embed the Fundamentals into your routines. In this post, I’ll offer another suggestion for making your rituals more effective.

Here’s a question I get often: “How do we keep our rituals from becoming stale, tired, and meaningless?” The first time I heard this question, the person gave me the example of saying their prayers before bed every night as a child. They admitted that they weren’t really praying and they didn’t want the rituals around their Fundamentals to become equally bereft of meaning.

Here are three simple suggestions to keep your rituals alive and meaningful:

1. Create interaction or engagement. If I stand in the front of the room and read or lecture about the Fundamental of the Week, and the audience is in a totally passive role, it’s likely to start going in one ear and out the other. However, if we engage people in lively discussion about the Fundamental by asking questions and getting their participation, it’s likely to stay fresher. The more you can create interaction, the more alive it will be.

2. Vary the voice. Consider rotating who leads the discussion or who writes about the Fundamental of the Week. Hearing from different people who have different perspectives gives variety and depth to the Fundamental, and keeps it more interesting for the recipients or listeners.

3. Use personal stories and relevant examples. Personal stories tend to engage an audience better than abstract discussions. The more you can relate the Fundamental of the Week to something going on in your company or your personal life, the more relevant and meaningful it feels, and the more interesting it is for the audience.

Rituals are absolutely essential to helping you stay consistent and achieve the repetition that’s necessary to internalize your Fundamentals. Taking these steps to keep the rituals fresh will go a long way to keeping your people engaged.

If you’d like to learn more about how you can use rituals to deepen the teaching and absorption of your culture, just give us a call or shoot us an e-mail. We’d be glad to help.