Process and ritual. Never have I been more aware of the importance of these things than when I sat up into the night on 20th January 2021 to watch the inauguration of the 46th President of the United States. As I watched a ceremony that I have honestly never sat all the way through before, a growing feeling came upon me. At first, it was a sense of comfort and familiarity. The line of former Presidents who walked down the steps of the Capitol building were known to me – or felt known. I don’t think I was particularly impressed with all of them during their tenure, memories fade, but I was strangely comforted to see them.
From there, the event unfolded – snow and sunshine, sharp wind and scarfs, bumped fists and fumbled handshakes. The epic tone of each announcement brought excitement to the mundane; there were celebrated heroes, there was pageantry and in a unique United States way, there was pop music. Oaths were taken, symbolic gestures were registered and I imagine feet were frozen and teeth were chattering.
As I continued to be sucked into the event, ready for bed but unable to turn off the TV, I moved beyond comfort, beyond familiarity, into something quite close to nostalgia. I am not American, so it is strange that I was able to generate nostalgia for something I had never experienced. There is actually a word for this – saudade. It came, I think, from my own growing up when the culture I absorbed was the TV culture of cowboys, cold war spies and Uncle Sam. I make no political comment by writing about this – the thought I would like to share is about culture, about process and about ritual and the critical parts that these things play in our personal and spiritual lives.
This is the first blog on a brand new website – welcome to Takumi X if it is your first visit. We launch our new division with spirit and culture uppermost in our minds. The spirit of the Takumi is to be industrious, is to be a perpetual learner, is to be the master craftsperson. Our craft, that I hope we are able to say we have gone some way towards perfecting, is to work with people. If culture eats strategy for breakfast (Coffman and Sorensen) then people eat process for lunch. People are your organisation – there are no organisations without people (you will correct me if I’m wrong here). There is simply so much academic research to the effect that engaged and motivated workforces are more productive, more loyal, harder working that it still rather shakes me to hear stories of bosses that bully or HR teams that measure and catch out.
What we saw played out on a chilly January day in Washington was an attempt at a complete cultural reset. I thought it was a pretty good effort, whether one believed in the content of the reset or not. As a leader, if you want people to behave differently, you need to behave differently. We only control our own behaviours and if we seek to gain purchase by controlling the behaviours of others by rules rather than culture – we will fail.
Takumi X exists to build relationships, to partner in problem solving, to help generate solutions. We can generate, ideate, coach, train and redirect organisational thinking. Where energy flow is blocked, be it with individuals or structures, we can help with triage and treatment; where direction is lost, we can help with map and compass. It may have been cold on Capitol Hill yesterday but I felt a whole lot warmer when I finally got to bed.
