Fixed Points: The Rituals That Hold a Culture Steady

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Gustavo

Grodnitzky, Ph.D.

November 3, 2026

Part 3 of Steady Ground, a three-part series on leading through uncertainty.

One of the most common mistakes I see leaders make doesn’t feel like a big deal in the moment, but it ends up taking a surprising toll. Told to tighten budgets and schedules, they start trimming “nonessentials” like the weekly huddle or note from the plant manager or even celebrations like service anniversaries.

Yes, they’re saving a little time and money. But they soon discover they’re losing much more. Rumors spread, standards slip, morale dips. It turns out those “nonessentials” weren’t so expendable after all.

When times are uncertain, workplace rituals take on extra importance. And times are very uncertain right now, from the C-suite to Main Street, with no end in sight. Most of this uncertainty sits outside your control. You can’t promise your people a good quarter, a stable policy environment or a board that won’t change course.

You can, though, give them something else: predictability in how the culture of your workplace runs.

Why Is Uncertainty So Stressful?

As a leader, you’ve probably noticed that your people often handle bad news better than no news. It turns out there’s scientific support for this observation. Researchers at University College London had 45 volunteers play a simple computer game: turn over rocks, guess whether a snake is hiding underneath, and take a mild electric shock whenever a snake appears. The odds kept changing. Stress peaked when the chance of a shock was 50%. It was lowest when a shock was certain not to come — but also when it was.

“It’s much worse not knowing you are going to get a shock than knowing you definitely will or won’t,” lead author Archy de Berker said.

That’s the atmosphere many employees work in now. A shock feels possible at any moment, but no one can say if or when it will hit. According to APA’s 2026 Work in America survey, almost one-third of workers worry they will lose their jobs soon, compared with 26% in 2025. Gallup found employees are also anxious about reductions in wages, benefits and hours. How Fixed Points Steady Your Workplace Culture

When everything feels uncertain, your people crave predictability. Trying to brace themselves against the next big change, they often choose coping strategies that hurt both them and your organization: doomscrolling, compulsively checking email, trading rumors in the parking lot.

But leaders can establish and maintain healthier sources of stability. I call them fixed points: rituals and routines people can count on no matter what is happening. Fixed points don’t remove uncertainty. But they do help your people weather it. They grow out of understanding what you can and can’t control, which I talked about in the first article of this series. Your team can’t, for example, control the market. But you can control whether you meet every Tuesday and what happens when you do. A fixed point is a decision a group makes together about what stays constant.

Research on ritual runs in a consistent direction. In a 2015 study in Current Biology, researchers made participants anxious by telling them they would soon give a public talk. They then asked them to clean an object. Compared with a calm group, the anxious participants cleaned with more repetitive, rigid, predictable movements. Nobody told them to. Under stress, people start building small rituals by instinct.

Rituals also seem to take the sting out of failure. In a study by the University of Toronto, participants performed a short, novel ritual before a demanding task. Their brain recordings showed a smaller response to their own mistakes than in people who skipped the ritual.

Fixed points can do more than calm people down. Rituals that carry good feeling, such as recognition, celebration, and gratitude, help people think more broadly at exactly the moment your organization needs it. That’s because positive emotions widen attention and thinking, while fear narrows them.

The Power of Ritual: A Real-World Case Study

We recently worked with Tom, a division president at a building-products manufacturer with about 1,800 employees across four plants. Demand dropped, input costs swung month to month, and corporate asked every division to trim. Tom cut what looked like the easiest items: the quarterly all-hands, the monthly anniversary lunches, the Friday shift-change huddle where each team posted the week’s wins on a whiteboard.

Two months later, rumors were running rampant. Voluntary turnover among hourly workers had ticked up, and near-miss safety reports were rising at the largest plant. Angela, the manager there, told him plainly: “People think we stopped meeting because the news is too bad to say out loud.”

Tom realized the fixed points needed to return. But they also needed to evolve, because the old versions had been built for calmer times. He asked the frontline leads at each plant to redesign the rituals themselves. The Friday huddle came back shorter, with a new segment called “what we know, what we don’t, what’s next.” The all-hands returned monthly in a 20-minute format. The anniversary lunches came back unchanged, because employees said they were the one thing they didn’t want touched.

Within a quarter the rumors had quieted and the near-miss trend had turned back down. Nothing about the market had improved. Tom had simply given his people fixed points again, and let the people who used them shape them.

How to Build Cultural Rituals That Matter

Start with an honest inventory. List the recurring moments in your organization that people can count on, and ask which of them actually mean something to them. You’ll usually find a few that matter far more than their cost suggests, and a few that have become empty habit.

Keep the form steady and let the content change. A ritual held too tightly stops serving anyone. Keep the Friday huddle, and let what happens in it change with the times.

Protect the rituals that carry positive emotion. Recognition, celebration and gratitude are easy to cut but expensive to lose.

Hand the design to the people who live the ritual. A ritual handed down from leadership often lands as forced fun, with employees just going through the motions. The people who live a ritual know which parts matter. The rituals that last are the ones they helped design and believe in.

Add one ritual that directly addresses uncertainty. The “what we know, what we don’t, what’s next” huddle works because it turns concerns about the unknown into a regular, shared agenda item instead of a private worry.

Fixed points can be small. In our Culture Catalyst program, we establish Accountability Partnerships, peer pairs who meet for a few minutes every day. Leaders are often surprised by how much steadiness a daily five-minute conversation creates when everything else is shifting.

Before the Next Crisis, Set Your Fixed Points

This series began with a line that Stoic philosopher Epictetus drew nearly 2,000 years ago between what is up to us and what is not. The first article applied that line to a single leader’s judgments, words and deeds. The second looked at the hardest words leaders have to find in uncertain times. This one extends the line to a whole organization. Fixed points can’t be something leaders scramble to build in a crisis. They have to be designed with care in ordinary weeks, so they’re already in place when people need steady ground.

I’d love to hear your questions and reactions. If any of this is showing up in your organization and you’d like to talk it through, you can book a 30-minute Insight Call with me.

Steady Ground: Leading Through Uncertainty