Well said. I agree with you on the particular distinction between ritual/ceremony and solid operational procedures, and am appalled that anyone with intellectual ambitions would see them as the same kind of thing, let alone interchangeable.

True ritual and ceremony have their purposes even in a secular environment, or at least not specifically religious, but even then they are not operational procedures and to serve their actual role they have to be tied to something real about the identity group. Not the made up BS that dominates corporate and government culture.

On the wider implied issue, agree with Confucius that Rectification of Names is the heart of almost anything involving wisdom or intellect. If he were alive today, he would be in a state of un-Confucian blind rage 24/7.

Borrowing the terminology and surrounding semantic cargo that comes with using terms like “ritual” and “ceremony”, both of which denote a time-hallowed unchanging heritage, in order to conflate them with things like aircraft pre-flight checklists…? No. Just… No.

There are key and fundamental differences here, and the liturgical freight implied here does not do the fundamental concepts they’re trying to get across much in the way of good. Ritual implies mindless, rote behavior done for it’s own sake; an aircraft checklist is something that is subject to change, and modification depending on the needs of the moment. On the surface, it may look like a ritual, but it is actually far from it–It is, in reality, a mnemonic aide-memoire consciously intended to aid the crew in performing a complex task. As such, it is the precise opposite of “ceremonial ritual”, because that terminology implies a mindless, slavish adherence to mere custom, as opposed to a thinking man’s approach to dealing with a complex environment.

These things all make use of the same meta-features of human cognition, but I’m going to have to object to borrowing religious iconography and terminology to adapt these tools to everyday life. The words are important–You say “ritual” and “ceremony”, and you’re talking about things that are done in accordance with faith, religious belief, and time-honored customs–Most pointedly not things that are adaptable and ever-changing to meet the needs of the moment.

I think this book has some good points, some good ideas, but the language the authors have chosen to couch it in will result in many rejecting the information and ideas therein. They’d have done better to use different terminology like “mnemonic aides-memoire” to get across the same ideas, because the religious are going to take offense at the hijacking of their customary terms for secular uses, and the non-religious are simply going to see those terms and reject the ideas because of the clothes they’re wearing.

On top of that, it’s just… Wrong. You’re not doing a “pre-flight ritual”, which implies that somehow your mere going through the motions will somehow propitiate the “Gods of Flight”, you’re doing a damn checklist to ensure you’ve thought of everything and done everything you need to do. Calling it a “ritual” implies a mindless quality to it all, like that Afghan flight engineer who sacrificed a goat before one flight to ensure the plane would make the mission…

Wrong terms. Please refer to Confucius, and his passages on the Rectification of Names, contemplate the meanings and usages of the language you’re using, and then try again.

Thanks.

Well said.

That’s why our measuring sticks for ceremony are “do you walk away fulfilled” and “does the team still do the ceremony when the boss is out”.

Events that are not repeated are rarely good ceremonies. What we’re seeking is a replacement of some portion of the giant mass of irredeemably useless make-work meetings by ceremonies that evolve into usefulness.

This is a very, very tricky thing to manage, and the nuances are extraordinarily subtle.

Sure, you can do a lot of good with a ceremony, but the moment you go over the edge from “valuable psychological tool” into “incredible pointless waste of time”, well… The thing becomes positively detrimental.

A successful ceremony, where “successful” means “something actually meaningful and effective in psychological effect” has to be something that speaks to the participants, and needs to be carefully calibrated in terms of timing, elaboration, and meaning. Getting it right is not easy, and I’d almost suggest that because the tipping point between false pretense and actual meaning is so hard to hit right, you are almost better off not doing these things as an official “thing”. Sometimes, the informal one-off impromptu sort of thing is more meaningful and actually effective than the carefully-staged and elaborately planned major “event”.

Sensitivity to this isn’t something a lot of our managers and leaders are good at. Pretense and falsity are easily identifiable from below, and show more about the leadership than they realize, particularly in the prioritization and resources assigned the ceremony.

When you put more planning effort and resources into the annual West Point Founder’s Day events than you do the planning and preparation for the only major field exercise your brigade will be doing that year…? Yeah; fat lot of good that ceremony does for your soldier’s morale, and their perceptions of your leadership.