Approaching a ritual design strategy: Thinking ritually to support an organisational collaboration strategy

Abstract

This thesis traces the design of a method – a ritual design method – for thinking through the design of activities and things. My research goal was to evolve and apply a design method informed by ritual scholarship and based on the analysis of empirical ethnographic data. This resulted in a new way of approaching the analysis and design of interventions and of seeing, thinking and writing which I call a ritual design strategy. I developed this method during my tenure at Air New Zealand, the national airline of New Zealand, where I was a member of the Workplace Relations team. Our team’s mission included sustaining an organisational strategy that intended to build a more collaborative culture, to embed collaborative problem solving across the organisation and to strengthen the working relationship between company management and the labour unions that represented two-thirds of the approximately twelve thousand employees. This organisational strategy was called High Performance Engagement, or HPE. The mission required the design of interventions: 'activities' such as governance meetings, training sessions, collaborative problem solving workshops and informal conversations, and 'things' such as texts, graphics, digital and audio-visual materials. I evolved my ritual design strategy through my engagement with each intervention opportunity and this yielded a method that is generalisable for application across a wide range of circumstances and design-related problems. Ritual design is not specifically for designing rituals; it is a novel method that can be ritual-like itself, through which meaning is created and operationalised.