Industrial digitalization and its promises propel manufacturing firms to pursue digital reality. When changing ways of working, organizational actors often introduce digital artifacts to create a preferred situation where digital technology creates and shapes physical reality. 

This thesis focuses on how a change initiative, interpreted as routine design, could change organizational routines. Routines are dynamic and the dynamics of routines present a puzzling situation for routine designers. Routines are not things. Instead, routines are generative systems that give rise to learning. Digital technology is also generative. At the same time, to design routines is to interrupt the current dynamics, which routine designers are not always able to intentionally change. Not much is known about how organizational actors design the so-called live routines. This thesis offers insights by addressing two puzzles: the puzzle of generativity to make live routines, and the puzzle of recursiveness to make routines alive. 

Through a longitudinal study over three years, a change initiative denoted the MBD (Model-based Definition) project was observed at a Swedish gas turbine manufacturer. Aiming toward a preferred situation of a digital thread, the team designed model-based ways of working for manufacturing and assembly during an agile development of a PLM (Product Lifecyle Management) system. The case studied was analytically approached, using two modes of analysis: an in-the-flow prehensive analysis zooming in on design actions and an after-the-fact reconstructive analysis zooming out to understand evolutionary routine change. 

The empirical findings suggest that the puzzle of generativity was addressed through the team’s design actions to (re)configure sociomaterial assemblages. The team removed stoppers in problematic situations that indicated breakdowns within the envisioned sociomaterial assemblages. The findings also suggest that the puzzle of recursiveness was addressed through intentional variation, spatial retention, and temporal retention during which a digital artifact transformed and successively exerted its influence on routines. 

A spatiotemporal multiplicity of routines was observed. Theoretically, when focusing on routines as patterns of action, the findings suggests that live routines are a duality of both one (routine) and many (ways of working) in which new many are designed and a one is materialized.