Stories from Rituals Dinner NYC: Physical Symbols of Cultural Values
A few reflections from last week’s Rituals Dinner in NYC
“Should we host a Rituals Dinner?”
The Rituals of Great Teams project started with a small dinner. I was meeting with Naveen Gavini, then CPO at Pinterest, about their rituals and he was telling me about Pyramid OKRs. At the end of our meeting, he said “that was fun, do you think I could sit in for one of your future interviews?” My initial reaction was “that’s a bit strange,” but he modified his idea and said “how about we host a dinner?”
This was in the middle of 2020, so the dinner had to be virtual. We invited six friends from great companies like Snowflake, Spotify, Slack, etc, and started with a very simple format: everyone just had to share one Golden Ritual from their team. It was a lot of fun and a new tradition was started. For the past ~3 years, I’ve hosted a similar Rituals Dinner every 2-4 weeks. It’s one of my favorite activities as I get to meet and learn from hundreds of interesting people, and these stories are the primary source material for my upcoming book.
As COVID protections lightened up, the format turned to in-person and we started holding them in different cities around the world. Last week’s dinner had ~20 participants and was hosted in NYC in an extremely unique room at the Estiatorio Milos Restaurant (highly recommended btw!):
Physical Symbols of Cultural Values
As always, last week’s NYC dinner was a lot of fun. There was an extremely wide array of rituals shared. We talked about planning systems, different decision-making techniques, the pros and cons of performance review systems, etc. But the most fun theme we discussed was “physical symbols of cultural values.” It turned out that many of the participants had a ritual in this pattern: a physical gift used to reinforce something important to the company. A few examples...
Jon Hackett from Huge shared their “swing the axe” ritual. It's a symbol of reducing and cutting out the unnecessary or extra that gets in the way of great ideas. On your 5 year anniversary with Huge you are presented with your own axe at an all hands meeting. The axes are pretty epic:
Kate Zasada shared how Etsy created a “3-armed sweater” for the engineer who took down the site in the most spectacular way. One of the core values within engineering is to embrace mistakes/bugs and use them as learning opportunities. People routinely sent all-engineering emails about near-misses or mistakes to help people learn, and the 3-armed sweater was a way to recognize that behavior each year. There was a physical one commissioned to hang over your desk, and it also made its way onto the 404 page:
Marcus Frödin from Spotify described their “Tech Health Day”. The premise is that every team has a certain amount of debt management they have to do. What they’ve done is simply gamify it, so the different departments compete against each other, usually quarterly, over the course of a day. There are game show hosts, a leaderboard, special challenges that give extra points, etc., and at the end of the day there’s a wandering trophy where the winning team’s name gets engraved. It’s a simple and small ritual, but it’s got two great things going for it: first, it means they do 80% of their tech debt, migrations, etc for the quarter over the course of a very intense day, and second, it’s grassroots-led, so gives younger engineers a great chance to step up.
At Coda, our most similar award is the Golden Shovel. This award is for unglamorous work that does not result in a launched feature or a sale or a hire but that improves our internal productivity and/or improves our customer experience. It started with our eng lead, Oliver Heckman’s observation that “a deleted line of code is worth 10 new lines of code but it makes for a really lousy demo.” The award is a physical cube, and there’s a fun award ceremony as well:
Each of these rituals was clearly memorable, but also notable for how they emphasized a core, unexpected company value. A very effective technique!
Do you have a physical symbol ritual?
I’m refining this chapter in the rituals book now and would love more examples. f you have a great one to share, I’d love a picture and a description of the ritual (comment or reply, both work fine).
For the next entry...
As I start publishing more regularly, I’m thinking through topics for the next entry. A few on my mind:
How teams run multi-threaded meetings, and why they are so effective
The power of a hackathon where you’re not allowed to ship your project
Fun personal rituals: teaching your kid to drive, effective ways to manage your time, how to agree on a complex purchase decision, ...
PSHE: A different way to think about performance evaluations
The story behind the Walmart Cheer
What to do after your planning process is complete: How effective teams drive continued visibility and accountability to the plans they set
Feel free to leave your thoughts (or other ideas!) in the comments, or reply to me!
👋 This little newsletter experiment is just getting started. So if you enjoyed this post, I’d love it if you subscribed and shared with a friend. Have a wonderful day! ✌️
Hey Shishir,
I am a big fan of your way of operating your life and company. I love coda and you can really feel how well your philosophy has shaped the company by the through and through positive interactions I have had with your colleagues.
Your dinners that you have hosted have not left my mind for quite some time and have inspired me to trying something similar within my circle of friends. My idea is to get everyone together and discuss meaningful and interesting topics. Right now I am unsure how to find fitting topics and how to go about organizing this dinner. When and how do I insert the prompt into the conversation for example?
You seem to have a lot of experience with such dinners. Would you mind sharing some of your insights on this topic?
All the best
Kevin Donath
Please write next about: PSHE: A different way to think about performance evaluations