Moving Together

The other week, ESPN had a great article about the pre-game rituals the Phoenix Suns basketball team goes through to get themselves mentally ready to complete. 

They described part of the ritual thusly: "Fifteen players simultaneously execute 14 unique handshakes—curated for every teammate—in a dazzling display of synchronized muscle memory so impressive that the Euro steps and step-back 3s that follow on the court seem almost simple."

The video of the routine is worth checking out.

Of course, many parts of the team’s ritual are silly—the handshakes have nothing to do with one’s ability to dribble or shoot or pass a basketball—but the ritual plays a role in bonding the team. 

From the article: "’We have a real team,’ forward Jae Crowder says. ‘We have camaraderie. We play for one another. We're all on the same page. I think that keeps us connected.’”

Chris Paul added, “That right there has sort of been our little sacred space.”

(I suspect the ritual also helps the team with centering.)

Annie Murphy Paul’s The Extended Mind explains why a group ritual of synchronized movement is valuable. She shares this anecdote about historian William McNeill:

“As a young man, he was drafted into the US Army and sent to basic training in Texas. There he and his fellow recruits were ordered to march ‘hour after hour, moving in unison and by the numbers in response to shouted commands, sweating in the hot sun, and, every so often, counting out the cadence as we marched: Hut! Hup! Hip! Four!’ McNeill recounted. ‘A more useless exercise would be hard to imagine,’ he notes wryly, and yet as the hours wore on, he found himself entering ‘a state of generalized emotional exaltation.’ ‘Words are inadequate to describe the emotion aroused by the prolonged movement in unison that drilling involved,’ he wrote. ‘A sense of pervasive well-being is what I recall; more specifically, a strange sense of personal enlargement; a sort of swelling out, becoming bigger than life, thanks to participation in collective ritual.’”’ 

McNeill explained further: “The emotion it arouses constitutes an indefinitely expansible basis for social cohesion among any and every group that keeps together in time, moving big muscles together and chanting, singing, or shouting rhythmically.”

Annie Murphy Paul writes about an experiment done by researcher Joshua Conrad Jackson in which he tested the impact of synchronous movements and emotional arousal: 

“The result: when participants had synchronized with one another, and when they had experienced arousal together, they then behaved in a distinctive way—forming more inclusive groups, standing closer to one another, and working together more efficiently…” 

And if you’ve ever seen New Zealand’s national rugby team performing the Māori Haka before their games, it’s easy to grasp why this works. 

So — what if we’re not the New Zealand rugby team?

There’s no implied recommendation to undergo military training for your next team retreat. But there is something to having a shared ritual. As Paul writes, “people who need to think together should engage in rituals together—in person, at the same time.”

Those rituals might include some synchronous movement—even if it’s just an icebreaker that includes a dance. But it could also be doing a regular team walk to a local coffee shop or a cooking class together or a team lunch. It’s about engaging our senses and creating emotions together. 

Paul writes: “‘Eating together is a more intimate act than looking over an Excel spreadsheet together,’ observes Kevin Kniffin, an assistant professor of management at Cornell University. ‘That intimacy spills back over into work.’”