From Steady Habits to Bold Shifts: How Routines and Change Work Together

In my opinion, routines are important to stay consistent and to achieve long-term results.

• Eating healthy (high energy levels)
• Sleeping enough (building resilience)
• Meditating (to re-focus)
• Working-out (strengthening the body)
• etc.

On the other side, change is needed, to adopt to innovations and the new realities.

• Learning new skills (e.g. AI Capabilities)
• Building new relationships (in business or private)
• Traveling to new countries / cultures (to challenge your own status-quo)
• New hobbies
• etc.

Routines as stability anchors

Routines create predictability, free up mental bandwidth, and ensure essential work gets done without constant decision-making.

Well-designed routines can bake in change so it becomes habit.

Instead of forcing change as a one-time event, you introduce it into existing patterns until it becomes “just how we do things.”

Example: A sales team adopts AI lead scoring not as a special project but as part of their daily CRM update routine.

Change as an adaptive mechanism

No matter how good a routine is today, the environment will shift, technology advances, markets move, customer expectations change.

Change acts as a periodic audit, asking:

• Is this routine still serving its purpose?
• Is there a better way now?

Healthy change doesn’t erase all routines, but it selectively updates them.

Example: A manufacturing line swaps out a manual inspection step for AI visual inspection, but keeps the same timing and reporting flow.

Bottom line

• Routines provide stability: allow consistent performance and bandwidth for improvement.
• Change optimizes or replaces outdated routines: keeps them aligned with reality.

Updated routines become the new stable base for the next round of change. The art is knowing when to protect a routine for stability and when to disrupt it for growth.