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> rituals have been helpful for your software development teams An interesting choice of word worth exploring. One could have said "activity" or "procedure", b
by nonrandomstring 5y ago
> rituals have been helpful for your software development teams
An interesting choice of word worth exploring. One could have said
"activity" or "procedure", but ritual carries some connotations
about the state of remote/hybrid working.
What I think you're asking is - what ways we can connect/bond in human
ways? Group dynamics, team identity, loyalty, non-monetary reward,
focus and satisfaction, and much more, are determined by the
interpersonal bonds that obviously have been disintegrating in a
post-pandemic workforce.
Great that people want to find ways to preserve that.
Rituals can be healthy, but also toxic. If an organisation already has
a strong charter they can be used to keep it on track. But they can be
used to select and filter group membership, and if anyone (the
super-sociable one) gets to define and enforce rituals they become a
mechanism for one group to take over the company and impose their
values by fiat.
For example, food in the workplace is contentious. I consulted at a
medium sized London startup where there was a daily banquet of
obscenely healthy vegetarian food. At the order of the MD's wife,
lunch attendance was "required", lest you fall our of favour with "the
family" (which is how she cringingly referred to the company
workers). She would sit and watch everybody with eagle eyes. Having a
controlling "feeder" policing the staff this way felt toxic.
In many big London firms, "pints with the lads" on Friday is a City
ritual that weeds out the family-men and those who can't navigate the
social status intricacies of "buying the boss a beer". Going to a bar
with 18 year old lap-dancers gets old when you want be at home and
talk to your wife, or 18 yo daughter about her A-level homework. In
some Japanese work culture, drinking till you can't stand up is a
symbol of workplace vigour and loyalty. Although in healthy companies
the women come out for drinks too, these rituals are often ways to
cement male domination.
To quote Nietzsche "What new rituals must you invent to atone..." As
rituals transform into electronic versions there is no doubt that new
controlling behaviours will emerge, making performative rituals of
loyalty, denouncement, compliance and symbolic belonging. There are
already new ways of including or excluding people via technological
means just along the lines of "Teams or Zoom" [1]
Meetings can also just be meetings. But really they are more.
"Rituals", if they are to be healthy, need to be optional, evolve
organically, and do so in a way that is inclusive of the whole team.
[1] Other much better teleconferencing solutions are available.
- Juliate 5y ago"Ritual", as well as "ceremony" as it's prescribed by some team methodologies, are both attempts to submit the team individual into a supposed greater order, where there's none. You may speak of ritual or ceremony when something has been instituted for generations or at least several years, for significant effects towards the group itself (not towards its output). When the form and content of your practices change every 6 months, and vary widly because the things you work on, or because the hierarchy mandates you to, or because the group/team itself changes, that's nothing that's been instituted. A business company may very well have its own set of practices. But trying to tweak vocabulary towards making them sound like they are of the same level of importance and impact as rituals or ceremonies, with what those words mean in the social and religious senses, is really an attempt at manipulation.
- nonrandomstring 5y ago> trying to tweak vocabulary towards making them sound like they are of the same level of importance and impact as rituals or ceremonies, with what those words mean in the social and religious senses, is really an attempt at manipulation. I absolutely agree with you, and it's all around us, and becoming normative. We work in an industry, only 40 years old at most, that believes, with near religious fervour, that it's purpose is to radically redefine the very nature of life, work and society [1]. (I was given this super interesting link to the Barbrook Cameron essay by another HN poster [2].) > When the form and content of your practices change every 6 months, and vary wildly because the things you work on, or because the hierarchy mandates you to "Move fast and break things" isn't only about technology. It's also about breaking extant norms and transvaluation. One of the sinister sides of digital technology, in my opinion, is precisely this lie of omission with respect to "disruption". It's not just about "progressively replacing old and inefficient", a disruptor weapon can be turned on anything to gain the ends you want. That makes an even bigger nonsense of the already ridiculous notion of technological determinism, because at the very least you now have to ask "determined by who". Which gang of breathless neophytes will be telling me how to live my life today? [1] http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/californian-ideology http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/californian-ideol... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=30931517 https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=30931517