Repetition Can Revive What Routine Deadens

Successful cities and companies cannot seem to escape the routine. As they grow and become more complex, they are compelled to standardize their modus operandi, often in the form of policies, operating procedures and other routines of bureaucracy.

- Poon King Wang

They also continue to do the same things, in the same way that made them successful in the first place. Lastly, they are susceptible to what the political theorist and philosopher Hannah Arendt once said: “The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.”

The perils are clear. Routine confers certainty, but that can also lead to inertia, through which successful cities and companies become comfortable with and stick to the status quo. In the best case, successful cities and companies simply regress to the mean. They no longer stand out, but neither do they fall behind. In the worst case, they are disrupted, as their successful current routines no longer service the demands of the future, and decline ensues.

How then can cities and companies escape these surly bonds of routine? Paradoxically, the answer might lie in repetition. In 1987, the renowned architect I. M. Pei was interviewed about how he worked. He compared it to a musical box, and said the musical box is extremely simple: It always has a theme. It has a certain repetition that does not seem like repetition. As a result, there can be endless variety based on that theme. This possible endless variety is what we can use to escape the numbing jaws of routine. And intriguingly, endless examples of this abound in our cities and companies.