Aga Szóstek — Author at Strategic designer
The Artist Way to Leadership
September 5, 2023
11:00
Collaboration
🇬🇧 English
Collaboration
Design rituals to unlock your teams' potential
About
Whether it's a morning routine, a historical tradition, or a religious ceremony, rituals play an essential role in shaping our identity and connecting us with others. Likewise, rituals can serve as a powerful tool for building a strong design culture, promoting collaboration, and unlocking the team's potential to achieve better design outcomes. In this talk, we're going to dive into the most important designer rituals out there, exploring how these shared experiences can bring chemistry, alignment, and collaboration to your team's creative process. And the best part? You'll learn how to design your very own ritual from scratch, including all the essential ingredients for success.
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From the recording
Talk in brief
At WaysConf 2023, design manager and consultant Nina Jurcic explores how design rituals build trust, psychological safety, and effective collaboration across product teams. Drawing on Émile Durkheim's sociological concept of collective effervescence, Jurcic distinguishes rituals—mindful, experience-focused practices—from automated habits and routines. She presents a case study from industrial IoT company Relayer, illustrating how a growing design team transformed chaotic daily standups into structured rituals, such as dedicated Design Days, Socratic design critiques, and weekly team health checks. Jurcic highlights how rituals must continually iterate to avoid fatigue and adapt to shifting company demands. To help teams create their own sustainable practices, she shares a five-step workshop methodology to define objectives, reflect on workflows, brainstorm proposals, vote on solutions, and establish logistics. She concludes that while tools and meeting formats will naturally change, a ritual's underlying purpose must persist to sustain high team performance.
Key takeaways
- 01
Rituals Build Trust Through Collective Effervescence
Grounded in sociological research, rituals generate a sense of shared energy and belonging that transforms isolated individuals into cohesive, trusting teams. This heightened involvement sets rituals apart from passive habits or repetitive routines.
Watch from 5:06 - 02
Socratic Critiques Unblock Creative Problem Solving
Effective design critiques focus on asking guiding questions like 'how might we' rather than offering immediate solutions to the presenter. This approach leverages collective intelligence while preserving the individual designer's autonomy over their work.
Watch from 12:56 - 03
Purpose Must Outlast Evolving Team Formats
Team rituals must adapt as workload, team size, and energy levels shift over time to avoid fatigue and disengagement. While operational formats and meeting cadences inevitably change, the underlying purpose of the ritual should remain constant.
Watch from 17:49 - 04
Structured Workshops Enable Shared Ritual Ownership
Establishing new rituals requires a collaborative five-step process covering objective definition, group reflection, proposal brainstorming, voting, and logistics planning. Involving the whole team in this workshop ensures commitment and collective buy-in.
Watch from 25:39 - 05
Rotating Facilitation Promotes Inclusion and Engagement
Distributing facilitation duties across team members prevents single-person burden and creates leadership opportunities for everyone. Designing rituals with inclusive considerations—such as neurodiversity, time zones, and non-alcoholic social options—ensures all members feel valued.
Watch from 28:56
Read edited transcript highlights
These concise notes were edited from automatic captions and checked against the talk structure. They are not a verbatim transcript.
Collective Effervescence and Mindful Focus Over Automation
Sociologist Émile Durkheim introduced the concept of collective effervescence a century ago to describe the shared energy and harmony experienced when groups gather around a unified purpose. Psychological studies show that ritualized actions—such as specific steps taken before consuming chocolate or carrots—greatly enhance engagement and enjoyment because they require conscious presence. Unlike routine habits like brushing teeth, which occur automatically, rituals are mindful practices that center on the experience itself rather than mere completion. In team environments, these shared moments establish psychological safety, trust, and a true sense of belonging.
Watch from 5:06Establishing Design Day as a Dedicated Alignment Container
To address scattered ad-hoc meetings during the shift to remote work at Relayer, the design team created a dedicated weekly ritual known as Design Day. Designed as a container for team collaboration, the day began with an icebreaker and agenda alignment, followed by topic-driven workshops requested by individual members. The day featured a shared lunch and closed with a retrospective where participants scored their return on time invested from one to five, followed by an informal dinner. This recurring schedule shielded designers from cross-functional calendar clutter and created a supportive space to align on design systems, navigation, and craft.
Watch from 9:39Unlocking Creativity with Socratic Design Critiques
Design critiques became a cornerstone ritual, enabling designers to present work-in-progress concepts, wireframes, or polished interfaces to tap into collective intelligence. Rather than prescribing direct solutions, team members used Socratic questioning—asking how might we solve a problem or clarifying design intent—to help unblock the presenter's thinking. As trust deepened over time, the team expanded this practice to establish shared design principles, meeting etiquette, hybrid workshop guidelines, and standardized workflows, demonstrating that consistent rituals directly accelerate team maturity.
Watch from 12:56Pivoting Team Formats to Combat Burnout and Fatigue
Entering the second year of the pandemic, increased workloads and company attrition led to meeting fatigue and reduced engagement. Recognizing that formats must evolve when conditions change, the team restructured their operational rhythm. They replaced fragmented standups with a single one-hour Monday meeting where members gave five-minute screen-share updates directly from Figma or research artifacts. They also shortened weekly Design Days to 90 minutes with bi-weekly extended sessions, and replaced end-of-week status updates with a weekly health check where individuals rated their well-being from one to five.
Watch from 17:49Co-Creating Sustainable Rituals Through a Five-Step Workshop
Building meaningful team rituals requires an inclusive five-step workshop that can be run on digital whiteboards or physical sticky notes. The session begins by defining the core objective, followed by participant reflection on current successes and areas for improvement. Team members then brainstorm and present proposals drawn from industry standards or personal experience. After clustering similar concepts, the group votes on top ideas to select the new ritual. Finally, the team establishes the ritual's name, definition, cadence, and logistical responsibilities, ensuring broad ownership across the entire team.
Watch from 25:39
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