However, balancing this consistency with new adventures is where things get a bit tricky. I kind of like Jeremy Howard's approach to learning here. I don't know if it can be applied to a company or a team scale.
Spend 50% of your time on predictable tasks, those that you have mastery over and can do comfortably. Spend 50% of your time on frontier stuff things that break your comfort zone.
Over time the some of the latter tasks will get into the former category, thereby leading to automation organically.
The ratio of comfort:frontier tasks is personal and let's engineers choose their ratio. Some may want the ratio tilted in the comfort zone (greater predictability ) while some may choose to adventure into the frontier zone (lesser predictability ). An organization should have space for both. Even the same individual can alter these ratios based on their life stages, external circumstances.
Put rather simply, a good software engineer can also choose to be a good technician and vice versa. Why should these roles be mutually exclusive ?