What Ritual Does

The building happens before the hard part. Always

The Moment

Last week was my first DA Day, marking the anniversary of the Canton Network launch and the people who made it possible.

Five cities. Five different clocks. Budapest turned a cocktail workshop into a DIY gastro experience. Hong Kong made pasta by hand. London faced off in a pressure-filled round of The Cube. Zurich got their hands in the dirt, planting an herb garden together. And here in New York, we played classic field games on a perfect afternoon, watching people compete fiercely, laugh freely, and leave more connected than when they arrived.

I stood among teammates I’m still getting to know, six months in as their Chief People Officer, many faces still becoming names, and felt something I’ve been trying to name ever since.

These people hadn’t just shown up to a company event. They’d chosen this company, this moment, to apply their talents to something bigger than themselves. That felt worth marking. Worth protecting.

What It Revealed

Our founders planted DA Day years before I arrived. You can feel the roots when you stand in it.

I’ve spent a long time building people systems, the architecture, the processes, the scaffolding meant to hold a company together under pressure. I came into this role knowing that culture, dignity, and satisfaction live in the spaces between the org chart. I’ve said that in many rooms.

But standing there in New York, knowing five cities were marking the same day at the same moment, I felt the weight of it.

That's what I'd been trying to name since the field: the particular relief of watching people choose you, your company, your moment, on purpose.

The scaffolding only holds because of days like this. Because people remember what it felt like to laugh together before they’re asked to sacrifice together. That sequencing is structural, not sentimental.

Here’s what I’ve learned about ritual that holds versus ritual that performs: the real ones are never about the event. They’re about what the event makes possible. DA Day works not because of the pasta, field games, or herb garden, though those details matter, but because it creates a shared memory that the team can draw on when things get hard. Performative culture-building skips that step. It produces a nice photo and nothing that lasts past the following Monday.

Every company has rhythms, artifacts, and rituals. The ones that stick aren’t always the ones written down. They’re the ones people reach for without thinking, in the middle of a hard quarter.

What I Practiced

I witnessed the connections, made a few new ones of my own, cheered my team and the ones competing against us, took photos and shared them, and thanked my team for putting it together because that labor of love needed to be named out loud.

It was watching someone I’d only met that day, deep in conversation with a colleague from a different department, both of them laughing, that made me think past the afternoon entirely.

And then I thought of what needed to be done to protect the next one.

That’s the practical move most leaders miss. A communal gathering is almost always the first thing cut when budgets tighten or calendars fill up. It looks discretionary. Nothing breaks immediately when you remove it, which is exactly what makes cutting it so costly. The damage is slow, invisible, and almost impossible to reverse quickly.

So the decision to keep it can’t happen at the moment. It has to happen in advance, in the planning cycle, treated with the same seriousness as a compensation review or a performance process. That means naming it as load-bearing infrastructure, not a perk, not a morale boost, not a nice-to-have, and being willing to defend that framing when someone asks why we’re spending money on field games.

The answer is: because trust isn’t built in difficult moments. It’s deployed in them. By the time things get hard — and they always get hard — it’s too late to start. The building has to happen before. On a field. Over pasta made by hand. In a garden nobody will remember planting until the moment they need to.

If you’re leading inside a larger organization, you probably can’t mandate a company-wide DA Day. But you don’t need to. You can create the rhythm at the team level. A quarterly gathering. A monthly lunch where work is off the table. A small celebration that marks the end of a hard season instead of just announcing the start of the next one. The key is repetition and intention — not scale. Small, human, and consistent beats large, elaborate, and annual every time.

What I’m Still Learning

We can talk about joy at work without making it sound like fluff. I’m still learning how.

There’s something about the word — or maybe the concept — that makes operators uneasy. Like joy is decoration. The thing you bolt on after the real work is done, usually in the form of a pizza party or a Slack channel called #fun. I’ve been in enough rooms where “culture” became a euphemism for avoiding the real problem, so I understand the skepticism.

Joy at work isn’t about loving your job. It’s about being able to do your best work without the tax of the energy you spend managing relationships, shrinking yourself, or wondering if you’re valued. It’s working alongside people you respect, who respect you back, where you can be direct and occasionally wrong and still feel safe. That’s the condition underneath the condition.

Joy isn’t the opposite of serious work. It’s one of the things that makes serious work sustainable. I believe that. The work is about saying it in the rooms where it would matter most without watching someone's face go skeptical before I finish the sentence.

A Question

What’s one ritual your team reaches for without thinking, and do you know how it got there?

Still practicing. Always.

——— Work y Más is free. If this resonated, the best thing you can do is share it with one leader who needs it this week. And if we haven’t met yet — I’m Daisy. Global CPO, keynote speaker, and author of Burnt Out to Lit Up and Inclusion Revolution. I write here from inside the work, the leadership, the practice, while it’s still happening.

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