Find Your Own Tomato War: How to Fortify Culture Through Ritual
Find Your Own Tomato War: How to Fortify Culture Through Ritual
By James D. White, Krista White | Published: 2025-12-01 14:00:00 | Source: Business – Big Think
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There’s a great way to start assessing your culture Review your written artifactsincluding your mission, values, and goal statements. You will also need to have a clear understanding of the roots and history behind these phrases. How did you get to where you are now? Do you feel that your written mission statement and values align with how your employees show up every day? Leaders with a clear understanding of these key documents and histories can use them as guideposts as they build culture; Or they can work on changing it to better represent the culture they want to design for.
Brenna Davis, CEO of the nation’s largest organic produce wholesaler, Organicly Grown Company (OGC), stresses the importance of honoring the company’s roots. She has respect for the company’s founders and retired alumni, who are referred to at OGC as “the elders.” Davis told us how the company supported its founders’ mission by creating the nation’s first permanent purpose trust fund. Founded in 1978 by a group of farmers, OGC has long focused its work on its mission: to promote and inspire the growth of the organic farming movement. In 2018, it took this history into account when it restructured to transfer ownership to the Sustainable Food and Agriculture Sustainable Purpose Fund. This allows OGC to focus on its long-term goal rather than short-term shareholder returns. In doing so, purpose and culture have become inextricably linked to how a business is run. Now, an organization’s relationship with its purpose affects how work gets done, how meetings are run, and how decisions are made. By understanding its history, OGC was able to forge a path for its long-term future.
For you, revisiting your company’s mission, purpose, values, and history may spark some initial thoughts about where there may be gaps between your so-called culture and how it manifests itself. When you compare your mission statement or documented values to your organizational policies and tactics, do they match? You may find that you have strayed too far from your original goal and need to find a way back.
History can also reveal how far you have come. For older companies, there are often lessons on what not to do and guides on how to reconcile past mistakes with your vision for the future. Whether it is oppressive systems or unfair business practices, history should not be forgotten or swept under the rug, but rather learned from. Follow these intuitions into the next part of your research and document them as you design questions for surveys, interviews, or roundtables you may conduct later. Keep your personal notes handy in a spreadsheet, a Google Doc, or an old-fashioned legal pad. The most important thing is to keep track of the work you’re doing here in a way that’s easy for you and your team to access when it’s time to get out there and talk and listen to your stakeholders.
the next, Explore rituals. From how you start and end meetings to how you celebrate employee contributions at your company’s annual retreat, rituals are the daily traditions that reinforce your culture. In meetings, people have used everything from routine check-ins to see how their team members are feeling to a shared moment of gratitude at the beginning of meetings.
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At The Honest Company, CEO Carla Vernon aims to create psychological safety and creativity, so she asks employees in town halls to share which of a pre-selected group of Pixar characters represents the mood or energy they embody in that moment. (Options include Joy or Fear from characters Inside outor the comforting optimism of a turtle crush Finding Nemo.) To foster a culture of open communication, Lee Wallace, CEO of fair-trade coffee producer Peace Coffee, places an agenda item in each meeting asking what needs to be communicated and to whom as an outcome of the meeting. Keeping everyone informed with the information they need to succeed is an essential part of change management’s agenda as it grows the company. Simple activities repeated over and over have a cumulative effect on culture.
Think about what it means to create rituals that are uniquely appropriate for your company and your colleagues.
Perhaps many of you are thinking, This kind of thing is not for me – You don’t see a connection between the results and asking people how they feel in every meeting. We know it works and we encourage you to be vulnerable, get out of your comfort zone and try it. But you also need to realize that not all rituals are about feelings. Other types of rituals that reinforce culture are brief weekly check-ins about successes and challenges during the week, a daily review of customer needs focus in staff meetings, or a bi-weekly cross-functional review and prioritization of issues that arose during those two weeks.
Celebratory rituals often take the form of a company picnic or holiday party, but think about what it means to create a ritual that uniquely fits your company and your colleagues. OGC has long celebrated its annual tomato war, in which team members go out at the end of tomato season and throw ripe tomatoes at each other. When we heard about this, we immediately wanted an invitation to the event, and were amazed that most companies don’t hold celebrations with this much personality and distinction. The fact that the OGC indicates to us that this culture was intentionally designed. Do you have any traditions that uniquely fit your culture? Do you have any ideas for new traditions you can establish? This is the intended piece of building culture through ritual. None of the examples we give you here will be right for you, but they should show you how specific and culturally appropriate your rituals are.
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