Lilla Hortoványi

Strategy Without Templates

Adaptation in Digital Environments

11.2.1 Beyond Environmental Dynamism: The Structural Absence of Referents

Strategy research has extensively theorized environmental dynamism, treating uncertainty as a function of the rate and unpredictability of change (Eisenhardt & Martin, 2000). Theories of turbulence, hypercompetition, and disruption all assume that while environments may change rapidly, they retain enough structural regularity to allow pattern recognition, benchmarking, and adaptive response. Firms may struggle to keep pace with change, but they can still observe what competitors are doing, identify emerging best practices, and adjust their strategies accordingly.

The template-free perspective challenges this assumption at a deeper level. It argues that certain digital environments are characterized not by rapid change within a stable structural logic, but by the absence of stable referents altogether. Platform architectures create winner-take-most dynamics that make competitive positions non-replicable (Kari et al., 2025). Algorithmic governance introduces opacity that prevents firms from fully understanding the rules shaping their performance (Clough et al., 2020). Ecosystem interdependencies generate distributed governance structures in which no single template can be identified or imitated (Giustiziero et al., 2022). The result is not merely faster change, but a qualitative transformation in the nature of the strategic context itself.

This reconceptualization shifts the central question from “How fast is the environment changing?” to “Does the environment provide structural referents at all?” It introduces a new dimension of environmental classification – not dynamism versus stability, but referent-rich versus referent-poor contexts. Template-free environments represent the extreme case of referent poverty, where the epistemological foundations for traditional strategic analysis erode. This has profound implications for how firms can and should act. In referent-rich environments, strategy can proceed through analysis, comparison, and selective adoption of proven practices. In template-free environments, strategy must proceed through experimentation, recursive adaptation, and continuous construction under constraint.

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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