You may think of rituals as an exotic thing from far-away cultures and  weird religious communities. Well, it is; but to the same extent it is intimately woven into the way we live our daily lives. Rituals occur wherever more than one person do something together. That is: in tribes, religions, countries, monasties and clubs; but also at work, in families and between partners.

Rituals
We all need rituals. A ritual is a way of shaping reality so you can deal with it. And if the way you and your community fellows have that thing in common it becomes a distinctive feature of your community. The most obvious examples include visual appearances: Aboriginals have white body paint, doctors in a hospital wear white coats, on National Geographic we can see how boys turn into hunters through a manhood ritual, where I live, marriage is a ritual declaring monogamy and the bride has a white dress, etc.

The not-so-obvious examples include: making PowerPoint slideshows for whatever you want to communicate at work but not at home (thank God!), budgeting discussions and the complete cycle of a fiscal year, coffee, KPI’s and Balanced Scorecards (they are the ‘nec plus ultra’ of a tribal belief in numbers), New year, wearing a tie on certain occasions, casual Friday and not wearing a tie, etc.

When looking at exotic or ancient cultures we tend to talk about rites and symbols as if we are way more civilized than that. However, our day-to-day lives are far more abundant with rites and symbols of all kinds, we only have different names for them. In our world we call them agreements, rules, legislation, organization, structure, strategy, common sense, logic, etc.

Habits
A habit is the same as a ritual, but on the individual level. It’s how we deal with reality. We do certain things our own way. Little things. And it’s the sum of a million simple things a day that give us a sense of security and identity. Habit is the daily success of forgetting that the nature of reality is unpredictable and groundless. It’s never the same river twice. We would go crazy if we were to approach reality without rituals and habits.

Addictions
An addiction is a habit exposed in a socially unacceptable way: where habit clashes with ritual. In my opinion an addiction has very little to do with what is good or bad for you, for good and bad are measures set by ritual. Get it?

Attention
I’m sure you can think of another million rituals and habits we use in our world. In fact, not an hour goes by without us shrinking whatever is happening around us to a digestible taste, size and portion by means of ritual, habit or addiction.

There are several ways to become aware of this mechanism.
- Listen to children: It just takes the fresh look of a child to ask ‘why?’ from time to time.
- Connect with weird people – the complete outsiders in rank and order of your community
- Limbo: when you are heavily involved in a change that determines the course of your life and habits drastically. For example when a person close to you deceases, or you lose your job.
- Read all of Dr Suess books, especially The Sneetches.

Takeaway
The takeaway for organizational change managers is quite important. The first thing you bump into whenever you want to implement an organizational change is inertia caused by rituals and habits.

Instead of labeling them as ‘resistance’, we’d better approach them with respect, because they define the very boundaries of people’s comfort zones.