From Induction to Initiation
How to use ritual to bring people into your organisational tribe
From induction to initiation
When I was a student I joined my university rugby club. I’d never played rugby before - dangerous physical recreation and a secondary school answerable to neurotic Jewish parents didn’t sit as natural allies in my experience - so the whole adventure had an air of enthusiastic tourism to it. I was fascinated by the athleticism, the brutishness and the camaraderie of the sport.
It wasn’t long before the spectre of the dreaded rugby ‘initiation’ was brought up. Rugby society initiation rituals are known to be intense, involving the members of the club being encouraged to consume large amounts of alcohol and do all sorts of humiliating and degrading things before being accepted in the club. Sadly and kind of unsurprisingly this kind of ritual - also known as hazing - has led to downright dangerous and abusive behaviour and has led tragically to injury and multiple deaths.
In the case of my rugby club initiation there was copious drinking, a bit of running up and down Regents Park semi-clothed and other hi-jinx , but nothing that made newspaper headlines. Or at least that’s what I gleaned, as I wasn’t invited.
You see I was lucky to take a couple of gap years before university meaning I was a couple of years older than the other recruits, and I was unlucky to lose my hair in my early twenties so I looked about ten years older. When I showed up to enroll for the club in my second year the people in charge apparently decided that they should go easy on this balding older-looking spry gentleman on the assumption that I was some kind of mature student and I wouldn’t be interested.
I think about this sometimes, and I wonder if I missed out on something important. Whilst I’m glad that I wasn’t hospitalised or traumatised from some kind of ritual humiliation and maybe my gentle soul wouldn’t have been able to handle whatever it was those posh boys dished out to each other in the early hours of an October morning. Nonetheless I always had the sense that those who took part in the initiation were somehow ‘more’ in the club than I was. They seemed to enjoy themselves more, they seemed more willing to get involved, and I reckon it made them better players on the pitch.
Rugby clubs aren’t the only human groups that have initiation rites. In Jewish and Muslim communities there is the rite of circumcision for baby boys, Catholics have communion and confirmation. Conversion ceremonies are similarly elaborate and steadfast.
When Homer Simpson joins the Stonecutters he had to undergo the ‘leap of faith’, ‘crossing the desert’, ‘the unblinking eye’, and ‘the paddling of the swollen ass, with paddles. He swears a sacred oath. The trope is tellingly familiar; if you want to join an important group that’s built on trust, you need to show that you’re willing to sacrifice something for the group.
In Awakening From The Meaning Crisis, Cognitive Scientist John Vervaeke explains that initiation rituals have always been part of human culture. Imagine for a moment a prehistoric hunter gatherer tribe who encounters a stranger. When resources are scarce and survival tenuous, a stranger could pose a real threat to the whole tribe. This wasn’t as much a cognitive issue as a physiological one. When an animal feels a threat - any threat - their nervous system will activate and prepare to run from the threat or fight it.
On the other hand, that tribe might want an extra person and be appreciative of the skills, knowledge and capabilities that they could bring to the tribe. Humans have gotten to where we are by being incredibly sensitive to social dynamics and understanding what’s happening in the mind of another. Initiation rituals developed as a way to help groups of humans switch themselves physiologically and conceptually and from a non-trusting mode to a trusting mode with strangers. Initiation rites also gave the stranger a way of knowing that they would be safe among these new people. Human sensitivity to danger created the need for initiations, and in turn the human ability to change our states of consciousness through ritual created initiations.
Human rituals have biological and sociological purposes, and as such it’s rational that we have them and use them even if the rituals themselves don’t appear rational upon inspection. For example, think back to your last job interview. What’s the first thing you did when you met your interviewer? Probably they extended a hand to you and you shook it in a ritual of building basic trust.
The handshake ritual originated as a way for two parties to show that they were not armed and therefore trustworthy. When I show up for a job interview I think it’s assumed that neither I nor my interviewer will be carrying a weapon (although it might depend on the job). It would nonetheless be considered rude or taboo if I refused to shake their hand. This ritual has been at the heart of iconic moments of attempted reconciliation and peace making.
These kinds of rituals are all around us, and weave their way into what we call culture. Singing happy birthday is a kind of ritual, as is wishing someone good health after they sneeze. Even your most rational atheistic logical person will engage in various non-rational rituals throughout the course of their day. It’s part of what it means to be a human.
Now consider the last time you joined a company or a team. You most likely underwent something like an induction. Someone helped you log in to your laptop and showed you where the toilets were. If you were lucky there was someone in the office to meet you in person. They handed you a new-starter checklist, some painful online compliance courses and a huge reading list.
Now there’s nothing wrong with any of those elements of an induction per se. They are nicely focussed rational and (mostly) necessary activities that any consenting adult should probably experience at some point in their stint at a company. However - I’d doubt that any of those activities left you feeling the same way about your employer that those puking half-naked spanked-raw law students called Tarquin felt about the University College London Rugby Society. There’s a sentence I never thought it would make sense to write.
What if instead of thinking about inductions at work, we thought about initiations? What if onboarding was infused with a sense of ritual. Of sacredness, even. Whilst we should obviously be mindful about what is appropriate and legal for a workplace, I’d even say that the sacrifice and bravery elements of rituals shouldn’t necessarily be zero. When I used to work at giffgaff the new starters were expected to get up in front of the whole company at their first weekly Monday morning all-hands meeting and introduce themselves with a short fact. It was an arresting experience even for a microphone-loving extrovert like myself but it did make me feel like I’d paid my pound of flesh for the purpose of acceptance.
Instead of thinking about onboarding as a routine and rational exercise in ticking boxes, what if we optimised it for trust, belonging, immersion and delight?
I’m going to explore how we could do this in a mini-series delving into the cognitive science of initiation rituals and imagining what this could look like for work. If I succeed, it will change the way you do onboarding in your company forever and help your new joiners to be ready to participate fully in the life and work of the tribe.