Big Birthdays: How Origin Stories, Rituals, and Community Celebrations Can Build Culture

Happy New Year! 

All of us at Leadership+Design are particularly keen on 2024 because we have a big birthday this year.  We are officially 10 years old - at least in our current iteration.  We are excited to mark our decade together with celebrations big and small and also to use the year as an opportunity to both look backward and forward. 

Birthdays and anniversaries, both personal and institutional, are important rituals in many cultures, and when they happen to end in a zero, we make a big deal about them.  Rituals, by nature, are about making meaning, and capturing important moments with intention and purpose. One of our L+D favorite books, Rituals for Work, by Kursat Ozenc and Margaret Hagan, offers the following about rituals: “A good ritual tells a story which often helps a person make sense of what is going on, figure out what it means in a bigger picture.” Every birthday is significant, and milestone birthdays deserve some attention and time in order to engage in meaningful rituals.

If your school has a birthday celebration coming up in the future, it’s a prime opportunity to build culture and to include your many stakeholders in getting clear on your mission, your values, your purpose and the impact you make on the world.  It can also be a chance for creative collaboration with a team that wants to design experiences for the larger community that can help foster greater connection.  As we have been getting ready for the big 1-0 at L+D, we offer some takeaways that might be helpful to you and your school, whether you are getting ready for a birthday or just looking for ways to build culture.

Revisit the origin story (or stories, as the case might be):

Every organization has a story of how it came to be. And to be clear, there is what actually happened, and then there is “the story.”  There is “the story” that gets told at official functions, and then there are the many stories that are told by the people who were there or that they have passed down over the years.  There is something incredibly powerful about bringing a group of stakeholders together and sharing these origin stories collectively.  It can be especially powerful if you still have access to the people who were there at the beginning and who can recall some of the reasons the organization was established, who it was created for, and the founding vision. 

If you can, find someone who can do a graphic recording of your school’s timeline, it is a worthwhile investment of time and money.   I first saw a graphic recording of a school's history when I worked at Lick-Wilmerding High School in the mid 1990s.  It had been done by David Sibbet at The Grove and it was a powerful artifact that sparked conversations about the past and future and provoked questions. The recording tracked not only the major milestones of the school (which was actually the merging of three different schools - each with its own origin story) but it also included key people, leadership transitions, tuition rates, major physical plant additions and even key world events that served as the backdrop to the school’s evolution over the years.

Because the school had been founded in 1895, nobody from the founding was around to share the "official" origin story, but yearbooks, and other artifacts from the archives served as excellent fodder for the timeline and 100 years later the origin story existed more as myth, which, of course is the case of most origin stories. We only know what has been passed down over the years.. As you chart your school’s journey, spend extra time on that origin story and all the different versions. Live into the tension that origin stories are true and also perfectly untrue.  What version of that story will be the one you tell today?

Collect and Share More Stories 

This year, the L+D team along with our board are excited to collect stories of our impact - on both individuals and institutions. We are curious to learn more about how our impact has evolved over time and how we might need to be different in the future - as understanding impact is a lot more than just confirming what you have done in the past, but also dreaming what you can become. If you have a birthday coming up, use these stories of impact to build connections, find patterns, understand the distinct qualities of your school and begin to think about the next version of your institution. Big Birthdays allow you to dream about the future with your community.

Stories are full of specificity. If you want to learn why your school is important to a student or family or alumna, instead of asking them generally about what they have found valuable, ask them, instead, to tell you a story about their experience. Stories have texture and they connect the individual experience to something greater and they bring the abstract to life.

Stories can be collected in many formats and in today’s TikTok world, video is king! If you are used to collecting written stories, try something new. Ask your community to create video or audio that captures their stories. Ofter prompts that lead to micro stories. If you want your stories to connect with a younger audience, consider capturing and distributing these stories in new ways and in new channels.

Examine Artifacts

In our work on school culture, we often talk about the importance of artifacts. Artifacts are any tangible evidence of the relationships, behaviors, values, and underlying assumptions of an organization. When L+D was revising our mission statement last year, we asked board members to share an artifact that helped us to understand their connection to L+D. This simple exercise helped us to clarify the things that they valued so that we could capture those ideas in our new mission statement and so that we could better clarify with current and future clients the value of working with us. 

Similarly for schools, big birthdays and anniversaries provide opportunities to share artifacts that matter to them. Artifacts often come with stories as well. They are visible representations of those stories. Encourage students, faculty and staff, alumni and parents to share an important artifact from your school. Consider how you might put some of these artifacts on display and foster conversations during your big year.

Build New Rituals

There is a difference between tradition and ritual, although there are some overlaps, of course. Traditions sometimes have a "we've always done it that way" feel to them which can be powerful and comforting. But some traditions may no longer connect to the community you have today. It’s OKAY to let some of those traditions evolve or even disappear. Big Birthdays can allow you to acknowledge long standing traditions but also to engage your community of today to design new rituals that may hold more significance and meaning to the people who are experiencing your school at this moment in time. Engage current students and families in designing new rituals that can also be shared with community members from the past.

L+D has changed so much over the past decade. While we hope to use this big birthday year to share stories and examine artifacts and hear from many of you about your L+D experiences, we are also excited to create new rituals that build our community and propel us into our next decade. We would love to hear from many of you about your L+D experiences. Stay tuned for opportunities to reflect and celebrate with us!

PS If you are interested in learning more about how rituals, stories, and artifacts impact your culture, consider joining us in March in Salt Lake City for CultureLab.