This article could serve as a footnote to the previous three articles on this blog focused on innovation at the biological, personal, and organizational level. It also stands alone. The focus is on reducing surprise through routines and its role at the biological, personal, and societal levels of life.
Reducing surprise has been observed as one of the key drives of autoptic organisms (Thompson, 2014). An autopoietic organism cares about its own survival, and in a relationship with the external environment it takes care of itself. A human being is an example of autopoiesis in practice. A human being instinctively cares about surviving and engages in exchange with the external world to maintain survival.
A human being identifies what is relevant externally to its survival such as food, shelter, and social connection, and formulates plans, strategies, and routines to acquire essentials and sustain itself (Varela et al, 2016). Once a human being has acquired the basics to survive and survive well (Whitehead, 1929), it will seek to make surviving well sustainable.
Surviving well in a sustainable way requires habits, routines, procedures, and processes. This has a two-fold benefit. Firstly, it enables shelter, food, and social connection to be maintained with minimal effort. For example, a human being has routines concerning the acquiring of food. Whether this is hunting or going to the store, the routine allows the activity, or at least parts of it, to be placed on “auto-pilot” (Henriques et al, 2019, Klein, 2011). Placing the acquisition of food on autopilot frees up processing time for other activities. Other activities include anything from leisure to scientific discovery. As human beings have evolved, the ability to place the acquisition of food on auto-polit, as opposed to a daily life and death struggle, has led to the development of other areas of life and culture such as science and art.
Secondly, routines, habits and procedures reduce surprise and consequently reduces stress (Thompson, 2014). If a human being went to the store every day for food and did not know whether it would be open or not, then life would be stressful, a routine could not be established. Every morning, our example human being would wonder if the store would be open. They would have to imagine what they would do if the store was not open, and begin planning based on alternative futures- where else could they try and get food from?
Routines help manage human expectancies and consequently, help reduce stress levels (Mcgilchrist, 2019). Routines allow living well by allowing certain basics to be placed on auto pilot, and freeing up time for other actives, even if this is just watching Netflix. Problems arise when too much emphasis is placed on routines to keep life stress free. When disruptive surprise occurs, cognitive processing needs to be moved away from expecting a situation to go a certain way and moving towards- how can this disruption be effectively managed?
A violation of expectancies requires the ingression of a degree of novelty (Klein, 2011, James, 1950, Whitehead, 1929). Naturally, this stresses any autopoietic organism, the future is uncertain and both survival and living well are not quite the forgone conclusions they were prior to the violation of routine. The desire to get back to normal is a strong primal and biological drive (Varela et al, 2016).
From the above perspective it is possible to see how routines have an almost addictive quality, something to grasp for and after (Varela et al, 2016). It is certainly not ideal to have a life where the fulfilling of every basic need is uncertain. Biologically this would stress the autopoietic organism. Vervaeke and Ferraro (2013) place the biology and human existence in context when illustrating this point. An autopoietic organism strives for homeostasis, a stable point between extremes. Homeostasis places the organism in an efficient mode of being. For example, the mammalian immune system is not so relaxed it fails to notice small cellular changes which could threaten survival nor so alert that it treats all cellular activity as threatening. Both extremes maintained for a prolonged period would lead to death, either by rogue cells going out of control or an autoimmune condition in which the body attacks itself in a hyper vigilant state.
Every so often an organism may occupy an extreme, which is necessary, but the regulatory biological processes walk the organism back to the middle. In other words, we are biologically attuned to avoid the extremes for prolonged periods of time and make our way back to homeostasis. Routines help homeostasis at multiple levels from the cellular to the societal to the cosmological, otherwise all existence would continually be falling apart and reforming.
Problems occur when too much reliance is placed on routines. Routines keep tasks and events in a form of equilibrium. External events will interrupt routines to various degrees, and it will be necessary to move further towards an extreme in the search for restored equilibrium. Towards the extreme of vigilance as normalization and certainty is sought by devising a solution, and then towards the extreme of relaxation as the situation is once again normalized, and from there, a walk back to the middle. A routine, however, can blunt this process. The routine can disconnect the group and individual from reality and fail to notice when a situation is changing (McGilchrist, 2019). A routine can be misconstrued as an answer, or antidote, to a constantly changing reality.
Routines then, despite the undoubted value, can lead to a lack of attention, to blind faith that everything is ok if the routine is followed. As Varela et al (2016) observe, human beings, particularly in the West, grasp after routines to manage life at the expense of fully participating in it. Put another way, human beings seek to place significant amounts of their life on auto pilot. As discussed above, putting the basics on auto pilot has an important role otherwise life would be lived at the extremes. However, routines can spread out of control, and the craving for answers and antidotes to reality create a void.
The void occurs where so much is taken for granted by the application of routine, put simply, there is always a routine for this and a answer for that. Imagination and intuition fall into the background of existence (McGilchrist, 2019). When so much of life is on auto pilot, the role imagination and intuition played in thinking about how to live better and novelty, is not functioning, a void forms. What fills the void is a greater desire for certainty (Nishitani, 1983). However, life is too dynamic and interconnected to supply certainty via a routine.
If the universe is a dynamic and constantly changing place, then it follows that routines will be frequently thwarted. When a routine is thwarted, then imagination and intuition is required to consider what to do next. If imagination and intuition do not fill the space between routine and the interruption of routine, then a void opens which becomes filled with anxiety (Nistani, 1983). By contrast, imagining what to do next participates actively with the environment and circumstances. It is thinking beyond the routine and considering what else could be.
To reiterate, if there is no imaginative engagement when circumstances make certainty impossible, there is only one other path, anxiety, a fixated worry about what will happen next (McGilchrist, 2019). In the anxiety there will be a grasping for an answer, to make the situation tolerable. This approach is logical, but not attending, noticing, and participating fully with the circumstances there is a risk that the answer which is grasped is poorly fitted to the situation. Crucially, to reduce the anxiety, there may follow the psychological need to convince that the answer is correct, to further enforce the need for perceived stability and certainty.
Human beings are biologically organized around stability and seek it. However, it is important to realize that the extremes of biological life exist because they are required to fit effectively into the continually changing external environment. The extremes cannot be managed away by routines alone, they must be experienced. Engagement with imagination and intuition allows human beings to move between the extremes and back to stability, and actively repeat this cycle as they move through life. The alternative is only anxiety when routines, habits and beliefs inevitably meet their limits.
Reading
Henriques, G. R., Michalski, J., Quackenbush, S, & Schmidt, W. (2019). The Tree of Knowledge System: A new map of Big History. Journal of Big History 3(4), 1-18.
James, W (1950). The Principles of Psychology, 2 vols. Dover Publications, vol. 1
Whitehead, N. (1929) Process and Reality. Simon and Schuster
Thompson, E (2014) Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind. Harvard University Press.
F. J. Varela, Thompson, E. Rosch, E (2016) The Embodied Mind Cognitive Science and Human Experience. MIT Press.
McGilchrist, I. (2019) The Master and his Emissary. The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. Yale University Press; Expanded Edition.
Nishitani, K. (1983) Religion and Nothingness. University of California Press.
Verveake, J. Ferraro, l. (2013) Relevance, Meaning and the Cognitive Science of Wisdom in The Scientific Study of Personal Wisdom. Springer.
