Organisational routines

Organisations get most of their work done not by deciding afresh each time but by following established patterns. Those repeated patterns, organisational routines, are the firm's working memory.

Organisational routines are the repeated, recognisable patterns of coordinated action through which organisations carry out their work. They are the established ways of doing things, the procedures, habits, and sequences that people follow, often without deliberate thought, and they are a central concept in understanding how firms actually behave.

How firms run on routines

Most of what an organisation does is governed by routines rather than by fresh decisions. From processing an order to launching a product, work proceeds through established patterns that coordinate the actions of many people. Routines are efficient: they let an organisation perform complex, coordinated tasks reliably without everyone having to work out what to do each time, and they embody the accumulated knowledge of how to get things done. In this sense routines are the operational memory of the firm, where much of its know-how is stored.

Stability and its price

The great strength of routines, that they make behaviour stable, reliable, and coordinated, is also their weakness. Because routines run largely on autopilot, encoding past solutions, they can persist long after the conditions that justified them have changed. An organisation can keep following a routine that no longer makes sense, simply because it is established and embedded. Routines make firms dependable and, at the same time, resistant to change, which is why changing how an organisation works is so much harder than deciding to change.

Routines as capability and rigidity

Routines underpin a firm's capabilities: what an organisation can do well is largely a matter of the routines it has developed, and superior routines, hard for rivals to observe or copy, are a genuine source of advantage. But the same routines, when conditions shift, become core rigidities, the established competences that turn into obstacles. Dynamic capabilities, the higher-order ability to reconfigure routines as the environment changes, are valuable precisely because routines themselves are so stubbornly stable.

Organisational routines are how firms remember, coordinate, and act, the patterns that make complex organisations function reliably. They are a source of both capability and inertia, which is why understanding an organisation means understanding its routines, and why changing one means changing the other.