Lilla Hortoványi

Strategy Without Templates

Adaptation in Digital Environments

2.4 Mechanism 3: Ecosystem Interdependence and the End of Separability

The third mechanism is ecosystem interdependence. Traditional environmental theory often assumes that firms respond to environmental conditions that are analytically distinct from their own actions. Even when mutual influence is acknowledged, the environment typically remains something that can be conceptually separated from the focal firm. In digital ecosystems, that separability weakens.

Firms increasingly operate within tightly coupled systems of complementors, platform owners, infrastructure providers, users, regulators, and adjacent actors. Strategic outcomes depend not only on what the focal firm does, but on how other actors respond and how those responses propagate through the ecology. This creates a recursive environment in which actors simultaneously shape and are shaped by the conditions of action.

Interdependence is not merely a matter of connectedness. Classical strategy frameworks already recognize that firms interact with customers, suppliers, rivals, and substitutes. However, interactions among these actors are often bilateral or locally bounded, relatively stable, and structured through separable relationships. This allows interdependence to be analyzed without collapsing the distinction between firm and environment. The environment, therefore, remains analytically separable and can be treated as given. In contrast, in digitally mediated settings, interdependence is structured through architectures, interfaces, and governance arrangements that transmit and amplify effects across the system. A platform rule change can alter user behavior, which affects complementor performance, which changes market entry incentives, which in turn reshapes competitive pressure. These effects are not confined to local interactions but propagate across interconnected actors. Therefore, the environment is not external to interaction. It is continuously produced and reproduced through relational feedback across multiple actors.

This weakens the assumption of separability. The environment can no longer be treated as a domain that exists independently of the strategic interactions taking place within it. Instead, firm behavior helps constitute the environment, while the environment conditions that behavior in return. The relationship becomes recursive rather than sequential.

This recursive structure also complicates causal attribution. Outcomes emerge from cascades of interaction that exceed the control or knowledge of any single actor. Strategy, therefore, shifts from responding to a given environment toward acting within a system whose structure is continuously co-produced.

This recursive interdependence also complicates causal attribution. In classical analysis, outcomes can often be linked more directly to firm choices or environmental conditions. In tightly coupled ecologies, outcomes result from cascades of interaction that exceed the control or knowledge of any single actor. Therefore, the strategic problem is not only how to respond to the environment, but how to act in an environment whose relevant features are being continuously altered by the distributed actions of others.

This point helps explain why traditional complexity concepts are not enough. Complexity theory often treats environmental elements as multiple and difficult to coordinate, but it does not always capture the recursive and cascading structure of digital interdependence. In platform ecologies, the issue is not only many interacting variables. It is that those variables are linked through architectures that can transmit small changes into system-wide consequences. Therefore, strategic action must be understood in relation to interdependence that is both structured and generative.

Tartalomjegyzék

Kiadó: Akadémiai Kiadó

Online megjelenés éve: 2026

ISBN: 978 963 664 204 4

Gazdaság

What happens when understanding comes only after action has already begun?

Traditional strategy rests on the assumption that organizations can understand their environment before deciding how to act. Yet the conditions that once allowed organizations to rely on benchmarking, best practices, and proven strategic templates can no longer be taken for granted. Today, organizations increasingly face situations for which no clear roadmap exists. Established assumptions become less reliable, familiar reference points lose their clarity, and strategic decisions must be made before their consequences can be fully understood.

Strategy Without Templates explores how organizations learn, adapt, and navigate environments in which uncertainty is pervasive and established templates are absent or no longer sufficient. Instead of treating strategy as a process of prediction and planning, the book explores how strategic paths take shape through action, experimentation, adjustment, and learning.

A central insight in the book is that temporary solutions are often necessary. What begins as a practical response to an immediate challenge may gradually shape future possibilities in unexpected ways. Some solutions create new opportunities and sources of advantage. Others become constraints that are difficult to overcome.

Hivatkozás: https://mersz.hu/hortovanyi-strategy-without-templates//

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