Ritual Reset
Ritual Reset is a team session that lists every recurring ritual the team has, such as meetings, reviews, social events and regular practices, judges how well each one works and decides which to keep, change or drop. It is documented as a play in the Atlassian Team Playbook. The aim is to clear out meetings that continue only out of habit while protecting the ones that give the team structure and connection.
Facilitation script
- 1
Set the stage: purpose of the session, how the group will work, and a shared view of what a good ritual does.
5 min - 2
Audit: everyone lists current rituals on the board and adds notes on what works, what needs improving and what is not working.
20 min - 3
Vote on each ritual: keep, improve or remove. Read out the result without discussion.
10 min - 4
Discuss the rituals marked remove and improve, most contested first. Decide what happens with each.
35 min - 5
Check for gaps and for knock-on effects on people outside the team.
10 min - 6
Record changes with owners and dates, and set a review point for the trial period.
10 min
Tips
Print or screenshot the team's actual calendar for a typical fortnight before you start; people regularly forget a third of their recurring meetings when listing from memory.
Ask what a ritual is for before asking whether people like it, because a disliked meeting may be the only place a necessary decision gets made and needs a redesign, not removal.
Treat every change as a trial with an end date.
Teams let go of a meeting more easily when they know they can bring it back.
Common pitfalls
The list contains only formal meetings, so informal rituals such as a shared lunch or a Friday wrap-up are overlooked and disappear by neglect
The team removes the one social ritual because it looks unproductive on the board, and notices some weeks later that cohesion has dropped
Decisions are made but nobody deletes the calendar series, so the cancelled meeting keeps taking place
A ritual shared with other teams or stakeholders is dropped without telling them, which damages the relationship and brings the meeting back in a worse form
The discussion spends half its time on a ritual everyone voted to keep and runs out of time before the contested ones
Variations
Meetings only: restrict the list to recurring meetings and add columns for duration and number of attendees, which shows the hours spent per week. Trial run: suspend the rituals voted for removal for four weeks, then check what was missed. Asynchronous audit: people fill in the board and vote ahead of time, and the live session of about 45 minutes goes to decisions. Cross-team: for rituals shared with other teams, collect the team's view first and take the result to the ritual's owner; do not decide alone.
Where it fits
When to use it
Calendars are full of recurring meetings and people complain they have no time for focused work
The team has changed in size, composition or location, and its meetings still follow the old setup
Several rituals have overlapping purposes, for example a weekly sync, a stand-up and a status email covering the same ground
A new team lead has inherited a set of meetings and wants the team to decide which still serve it
Nobody can say why a particular recurring meeting exists
When not to use it
One specific meeting is the problem: redesign that meeting directly, for instance with IDOARRT Meeting Design, instead of auditing everything
Most of the team's rituals are imposed by the wider organisation and cannot be changed by the team; the session then produces frustration, so take the evidence to whoever owns them
The team is new and has hardly any rituals yet; design them from scratch with Working Agreements or a Team Canvas
The complaint about meetings stands in for a deeper issue such as unclear priorities or conflict; a Team Health Check or a regular retrospective will surface that better
The last reset was a few weeks ago and the changes have not had time to settle; wait and review at the agreed date
Related methods
Frequently asked questions
What is Ritual Reset?▾
Ritual Reset is a team session for reviewing all recurring rituals, meaning meetings, practices and events, and deciding which to keep, improve or remove. The team lists its rituals, notes what works and what does not, votes and agrees concrete changes. It is published as a play in the Atlassian Team Playbook.
What counts as a team ritual?▾
Anything the team does on a recurring basis: stand-ups, planning and review meetings, one-to-ones, demos, retrospectives, status reports, but also social habits such as a team lunch or a weekly shout-out. Include the informal ones; they often carry more of the team's cohesion than the formal meetings.
How often should a team run a Ritual Reset?▾
Once or twice a year is enough for a stable team. Run one sooner after a change in team composition, a move to remote or hybrid work, or when complaints about meeting load become frequent.
How long does a Ritual Reset take?▾
Plan 60 to 90 minutes for a team of four to ten; the script on this page uses the full 90. Listing and voting take about half an hour, and most of the remaining time goes to discussing changes and assigning owners. With the audit done asynchronously beforehand, the live part can be shortened to about 45 minutes.
What if the team cannot agree whether to drop a ritual?▾
Run it as an experiment: suspend or change the ritual for a fixed period, for example four weeks, and agree what you will look at afterwards to judge whether it was missed. A time-limited trial is easier to accept than a permanent decision and gives the team evidence in place of opinion.
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Try it freeMethod descriptions on Workshop Weaver are original content written by our team, based on established facilitation practices. This method was inspired by work from Atlassian Team Playbook.