Organizational routines form the background and ensure the linkage of most everyday activities inside an organization. They have also been the subject of extensive scholarly inquiry over the last thirty years. Nevertheless, extant Routine Theory does not explain unequivocally their origin. It also provides only poor guidance on how to shape them in practice. In particular, there is a dilemma of how to facilitate their persistence whilst reducing the randomness of this process on the one hand, and, on the other, to maintain its effectiveness, dependent on the right degree of management involvement (and the associated cost). This article drafts one of the possible approaches to address this issue, referred to as incubation, and identifies factors influencing routine persistence (based on a thorough review of the literature), specific to the social subsystem of the organization. The identified set of factors may be further used to steer the routine incubation process.