Do you have a Ritual Deficit? The hard work of ceremony is directly impacting your bottom line.
Picture the last major transition your organization went through: a reorg, a merger integration, a layoff, a leadership succession, even a strategic pivot. Somewhere in your planning process, a familiar set of deliverables took shape. A new org chart. A revised reporting structure. An updated set of KPIs. A rollout timeline. A comms plan with a memo, maybe a town hall, maybe an FAQ document for managers to distribute.
These actions are necessary as part of any organizational transition. It is also the default in an executive’s playbook. Unfortunately, these actions are necessary but not sufficient. Primarily because it treats the major change as a tactical problem, like rearranging the deck chairs around a pool. It makes assumptions that if we communicate effectively, individuals and teams will interpret and ultimately understand the change in the “right” way. Most leadership teams plan for the structure of change and the mechanics of milestones. Very few plan for what people are losing, what story explains why any of it matters, or how the ending of one chapter is marked before the next one begins.
So why is this happening? And what do we do about it?
It is important to note that this same behavior shows up in smaller moments in an organization’s lifecycle as well. For example, a generic "welcome to the team" email or a retro/project debrief delivered by survey. We treat these moments as logistics to be processed rather than meaning to be made.
Why is this happening?
The foundational organizational leadership research of Lee Bolman and Terrence Deal, in their widely cited Four Frames model, offers a useful diagnosis. They argue that leaders interpret and act on organizational problems through one of four lenses: the structural frame (rules, roles, hierarchies, goals), the human resources frame (people's needs, skills, and relationships), the political frame (competing interests and scarce resources), and the symbolic frame (culture, meaning, ritual, and narrative).
Most executives are fluent in the first three. Structure and process are tangible, measurable, and satisfying to redesign. Human resources concerns show up on engagement surveys. Political dynamics are unavoidable and demand attention. The symbolic frame is different. Its effects are real, felt in commitment levels and discretionary effort rather than in a spreadsheet. Perhaps because the effects of the symbolic frame are not a solitary deliverable (like an org chart or hours you can log) the actions related to this frame are deprioritized. For most of the leaders I work with, the underinvestment in this frame is not because they don’t value culture but because its returns are harder (for them) to attribute and slower to show up.
The consequences of this type of leadership behavior is a ritual deficit. Rituals and ceremonies are how organizations create meaning out of ambiguity, bond individuals to something larger than their job description, transmit values more effectively than any policy document, and give people psychological closure during transitions. When leadership skips this work, culture does not go quiet, but instead it goes unmanaged and usually turns negative. Employees may generate narratives to explain what's happening to them; in the absence of a leader/team-authored story, employees will write a cynical one. Statements like, "Management doesn't care." "I am here just for the paycheck." "The mission does not match people’s actions around here."
Bolman and Deal's research on failed change efforts points to precisely this gap: leaders redesign the structure but neglect to mourn what's ending, tell a new story, or mark the transition. In short: the challenge a leader is facing is not a communication failure or an execution failure. It was a symbolic failure rooted in a lack of ceremonial architecture underneath to support the change.
What should you do instead?
Knowing that the gap is symbolic, not structural, the intervention isn't more communication, but different communication, treated with the same level of discipline and care as the structural comms.
If you do nothing else, you must audit your existing rituals against four jobs they need to do. Basically, we need to go look for indicators of health as it relates to our rituals. You are asking me, “What are the four jobs? Seriously, what are they?” Okay, here they are:
Job #1: Creates meaning - Your rituals should turn ambiguous events into shared understanding about the organization and its people.
Job #2: Builds belonging - Your rituals should help bind individuals to a larger organizational identity.
Job #3: Transmit value - Your rituals should support the teaching of the organizational culture through story, not policy.
Job #4: Marks various transitions- Your rituals must give people closure amid real change (both large and small).
A note about opening rituals vs closing rituals.
I will note that most organizations will find their "opening" rituals (e.g., onboarding new team members, kickoffs, launches) well developed, while their "closing" rituals, (e.g., endings, failures, departures, project wrap-ups), as light touch or even nonexistent. It is human nature for closing moments to be less celebratory and therefore easier to skip, which is exactly why they rarely occur, but are desperately needed.
Okay, once you have completed your audit across the four jobs of your rituals, there are four practices I would encourage you to consider, for both small and large moments of change:
Actively curate and tell the organization's story. Identify the founding narrative, the turning points, and the people who embody what the organization stands for and deliberately retell those stories at onboarding, milestones, and all-hands meetings, rather than assuming they'll transmit informally.
Design rituals that mark meaning, not just logistics. For any recurring organizational moment, treat it as an opportunity for people to process what's happening. For the celebrations, that’s easy. For hard moments, like a layoff, an email signals only transactional values. If a layoff is accompanied by acknowledgement and space for grief, it becomes a moment of reflection, gratitude and grace. The individuals that survive the layoff will remember the actions and they are the contributors to the forthcoming culture.
Model symbolic behavior personally. Employees read what leaders visibly do as the "real" values, regardless of what is written on an organization's website. A leader who shows up to a difficult conversation, receives hard feedback, authentically asks a direct report about the health of their sick child, acknowledges when they do not have an answer, or publicly credits others' contributions is doing more culture-building than any communication plan could achieve on its own.
Build symbolic communication into every change plan, not just structural communication. Before rolling out a major change, ask explicitly: What are people losing, and how will we mark that? What's the new story we're asking them to believe? Put this in the plan from the start.
Why invest in this type of work?
Rituals and ceremonies matter because most of organizational life is consistently ambiguous, and people cannot function indefinitely inside unresolved ambiguity. As a result, they will resolve the “grey area” themselves, one way or another, with or without leadership's help. Consistent rituals do the interpretive work for teams and individuals: it says, authoritatively, here is what this moment means. It creates a shared sense of meaning and belonging and people lean into giving extra effort for each other and ultimately the organization’s mission and goals. It is the mechanism by which commitment, discretionary effort, and resilience during hard times actually get built. That is a significant benefit.
And when the times are tough, organizations with a strong symbolic core have a story of "who we are" to draw on, which is why those organizations tend to recover morale faster than organizations that only ever communicated through metrics and mandates.
The structural, human resources, and political frames will always feel more urgent, because their problems announce themselves. The symbolic frame requires a leader to notice a gap that isn't complainin–yet. Unfortunately, by the time cynicism shows up in an engagement survey or resistance shows up in a stalled initiative, the ritual deficit has already been running for months. The leaders who treat ceremony as a discipline and not an add-on are the ones whose change efforts stick, whose talent stays past the point compensation alone would justify, and whose organizations survive and ultimately thrive under real pressure.
Bolman, L. G., & Deal, T. E. (2021). Reframing organizations: Artistry, choice, and leadership (7th ed.). Jossey-Bass.
As always, this section is about unlocking/disrupting your thinking. As you read, think about the ways in which your current models of leadership are serving (or not serving) you well!
No One to Say It To
The orchard had thirty-one trees, and everyone knew which was oldest.
The gardener had planted saplings around it every spring for a decade, and the young trees grew up in its shade, their roots finding room around the wide tangle of the old one's. The starlings nested in it first each year before spreading to the others. The children who came in autumn always climbed it, even when its branches gave less fruit than the younger trees closer to the fence.
In its last summer, it flowered but did not fruit. By September its leaves had gone brittle early, curling brown while the others were still green.
The gardener noticed. He said nothing to the orchard. Honestly, there was no one to say it to, not really, or so he told himself.
In November, on a grey morning before the frost, he cut it down. He worked quickly. No rituals necessary. He stacked the wood. He planted a new sapling in its place before the ground froze, in the exact same spot, so the line of trees would look unbroken from the road.
The starlings came back that spring and circled the place twice before landing elsewhere.
The young trees, the ones who had grown up in its shade, put out their leaves late that year, and thin. No one could say why. The gardener blamed the soil, and turned it, and fed it, and waited.
The soil was fine.
What the orchard was missing wasn't in the ground.
Apply the Learning - A Case Study: The Product That Just... Stopped
Aisha Odom is VP of Product at a fast-growing fintech company in Chicago. Eighteen months ago, she championed the launch of Lumen, an ambitious internal initiative to build an AI-driven underwriting tool. Lumen had its own kickoff event, a dedicated Slack channel, a cross-functional team of twelve pulled from four departments, and a launch deck presented at an all-hands to genuine applause.
For a year, Lumen was the thing people worked nights for.
Then the market shifted. A competitor released a similar tool at a fraction of the cost, and leadership quietly decided Lumen would no longer be a priority. There was no formal announcement. There was no budget being allocated. The Slack channel went quiet. Team members were reassigned to other projects one by one, over six weeks, through individual conversations with their direct managers. The project was not mentioned in any All-Hands Meetings. No retrospective or closing meetings of any type. By the time anyone said the word "canceled" out loud, most of the team had already moved on to new assignments and treated the subject as slightly embarrassing to bring up.
Aisha assumed this was the efficient way to handle it. Nobody's time was wasted on a meeting about something that was already over.
The Unraveling
Three months later, Aisha notices something in her 1:1s. The five engineers who worked longest on Lumen have become noticeably harder to read. Two have stopped volunteering for stretch projects they would have jumped at a year ago. One, previously one of the most vocal people in planning meetings, has gone quiet in a way Aisha initially mistook for focus.
In a routine skip-level meeting, one of the engineers, Devon, says something offhand that stays with her: "I still don't actually know what happened with Lumen. Did it fail? Did we fail? Nobody ever really said."
Aisha realizes she cannot answer that question either. Her confusion is not because the reasons were hidden, but because no one had ever had to articulate them out loud, together, to the people who'd built it.
She starts asking around informally. The pattern isn't isolated. Every canceled initiative at the company in the last two years followed the same shape: quiet, individual reassignment, no shared acknowledgment. Meanwhile, every new initiative gets a kickoff, a deck, a launch email.
Engagement scores for the Lumen team, pulled for an unrelated reason, are the lowest in the department. Two of the five engineers have updated their LinkedIn profiles in the last month.
Aisha has the budget, headcount, and executive support to start something new. What she doesn't have is a way to explain, even to herself, why the last thing mattered or didn't.
Case Study Questions
Aisha treated Lumen's cancellation as an efficiency decision rather than a leadership decision. What specifically did that framing cause her to miss, and at what point should she have recognized the gap?
Devon's question, "did we fail, did it fail?", went unanswered for months. By not answering that question, what is being communicated to the team in the meantime, even without anyone saying anything explicit?
If Aisha wants to address this now, months after the fact, what would a meaningful closing ritual for Lumen look like at this late stage? Is it still worth doing, or has the moment passed?
Aisha's company invests visibly in launches but not in endings. What would it take to build "closing infrastructure" into the org's default process, rather than relying on individual leaders to remember it under pressure?
