Lilla Hortoványi

Strategy Without Templates

Adaptation in Digital Environments

10.7 Leading Through Orchestration

In template-free environments, leadership can no longer be understood primarily as design followed by implementation. As Chapters 6 through 9 showed, strategy emerges through experimentation, stabilization, patchwork coordination, and mediated feedback. Leaders cannot reliably predict enough to design an optimal path in advance. They cannot fully impose coherence on patchwork systems. They cannot control outcomes shaped by external platforms and algorithmic systems. Leadership, therefore, shifts from architecture to orchestration.

Orchestration refers to enabling and coordinating adaptive processes rather than designing fixed solutions. Research on digital ecosystems shows that it involves aligning heterogeneous actors and continuously adjusting governance as conditions evolve (Jacobides et al., 2018; Kari et al., 2025). Rather than a one-time design effort, orchestration unfolds as an ongoing process in which leaders mobilize participants, expand the scope for experimentation by internal and external actors, and integrate and scale what proves effective. This perspective emphasizes that orchestration evolves with the system rather than remaining a fixed leadership approach.

Several implications follow. First, leaders must recognize phase transitions. Practices that support early mobilization may hinder later coordination. Second, orchestration requires managing tensions rather than eliminating them. These include experimentation versus stabilization, openness versus control, and flexibility versus coordination. These tensions persist and must be handled repeatedly rather than resolved once and for all.

Third, orchestration is fundamentally relational. Leaders coordinate across actors with divergent interests, capabilities, and dependencies. Such coordination relies on governance mechanisms, such as rules, incentives, standards, and communication, that enable alignment without full central control (Jacobides et al., 2018; Tiwana et al., 2010). Therefore, leadership in template-free environments is less about directing outcomes and more about enabling adaptive movement across distributed actors and partially integrated systems.

This shift has implications for leadership development and evaluation. Leaders in template-free environments cannot be assessed primarily on their ability to design optimal strategies or enforce alignment. They must be evaluated on their capacity to maintain direction under uncertainty, coordinate across heterogeneous actors, and enable adaptive processes without imposing rigid structures. Leadership effectiveness thus becomes trajectory-based and relational rather than event-based and hierarchical.

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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