The Missing Ceremonies

The thesis

A business is its people. Not “people are important”: the people are the thing. So emotional management is not a soft skill, it is core business strategy, and culture is strategy because culture decides how anything gets executed.

The book’s method is feedback. Not the gentle kind we get once we have enough experience to coast, but the kind that hurts a little, like the burn from the flame, and moves you one notch along. Taking that kind of feedback well needs emotional intelligence, and most of us stop developing it once we have enough to get by. Work, which can be 40% of a life, is a good place to start again.

Three ceremonies, three loops

Each ceremony meets one of the needs in Self-Determination Theory, and each plays a distinct part in the system.

Ceremony	Need it meets	Role in the system
Culture Box: regular conversations about values, background and company culture	Relatedness	Reinforcing loop for shared identity
Hot Wash-Up: reflection on what worked and what didn’t after an intense period	Competence	Balancing loop: the team’s thermostat
One-to-One: private conversations that build the manager–employee relationship	Autonomy	Reinforcing loop for trust and psychological safety

The system

Ceremonies meet needs. Met needs build psychological safety. Safety frees capacity that anxiety was using, which shows up as better work, which justifies the time spent on the ceremonies. Delays matter: emotional problems surface months after their causes, which is exactly why a regular balancing loop earns its place.

Standing on

Donella Meadows’ Thinking in Systems; Deci and Ryan’s Self-Determination Theory; Nancy Kline’s Time to Think; Don Norman’s Emotional Design; Timothy Gallwey’s The Inner Game of Tennis.

Read the draft chapters: A systems dynamics MBA, from a bathtub and The kind of feedback that hurts.