Most likely you start yawning the second you hear the word "routine", and I cannot blame you. Routines don't sound exciting. Rather, they sound dull, boring and are one of the reasons people want a drastic change in their life – a new job, divorce or a relocation to a different country (preferably under a new identity, with a set of passports and a suitcase full of cash of unassuming denomination). At the same time, routines have always served as the base for change, especially for incremental and gradual. Yet, throughout the 20th century and from the perspective of organizational theory, routines have been viewed as the source of stability and inertia. While it has been recognized that they reduce uncertainty and cognitive load (which implies that you can use this cognitive load for other topics – like change), they were too easily associated with standard operating procedures and resistance to change.

The “coming out” of the dynamic powers hidden in routines happened in 2003, when the seminal paper of Martha Feldman and Brian Pentland saw the dim light of a publishing house. Their paper, Reconceptualizing Organizational Routines as a Source of Flexibility and Change, marked a pivotal turning point and a renaissance for the concept. That is, it did so at least for those who read it. Not having an expectation that my audience has already reached any level comparable with that of established journals, I'd still like to share the main insights of that paper on my pages here. So, in the name of gradual change and knowledge transmission, here you go:

• The Duality Framework: There is a sharp distinction between the ostensive and performative aspects of routines. Ostensive aspect is the abstract pattern, it is the ideal form of a routine and represents the "normative" aspect of it. It incorporates the sentiment of "the way we do things around here". You can think of it as the routine in principle or the spirit of a routine. The performative aspects, on the other hand, is all about specific performances associated with routines. It is the execution, it is what actually happens when people perform the routines.
• The Generative Perspective: This is where the magic happens. This magic emerges when people enter the picture. People define the routines and create their "spirit" (the ostensive aspect) – indubitably incorporating their own spirit in these routines. They perform routines (the performative aspect), at the same time drawing on their understanding of the pattern (ostensive again). This understanding and the execution might be similar, yet each performance is necessarily different. This will be due to contextual factors, human agency and the reality that you cannot have 100% identical repetition of the action, even if you aim at it. These variations in performance then feed back into and potentially alter the ostensive understanding. These steps create a continuous cycle – vicious or virtuous will depend on quite different factors. At any rate in this circle stability and change will necessarily coexist: routines provide structure while simultaneously evolving through their performance.

Within this process there are two aspects adding yet more dynamics to our model.

• Endogenous Change: It is important to highlight that the generative perspective brings the endogenous change to the foreground: routines can change from within through the very process of being performed, without external intervention.
• Agency in Routines: On top of the endogenous level, there is also the exogenous one, and this is probably what I find the most fascinating. The authors highlighted how organizational members exercise agency when enacting routines, making choices about how to interpret and perform them. While routines are much more than an empty vessel, there is still plenty of room inside them to be filled by the meaning and the interpretation that the agents put into it. This opens totally new horizons for interpretation and for work with and of routines in organizational context…

In one of the next articles, we will have a closer look at the practical implications of these dynamics in organizational reality to bring more life into this. For, who is the best partner for a good theory? "Practice!", I hear you shouting out. And boy, how right you are!