Lilla Hortoványi

Strategy Without Templates

Adaptation in Digital Environments

11.2.2 Beyond Strategic Choice: Mechanism-Based Emergence

Classical strategy theory privileges the concept of strategic choice. Firms analyze their environments, evaluate alternatives, and select courses of action designed to achieve desired outcomes (Child, 1972). Even process-oriented approaches that emphasize emergence often retain choice as a central explanatory construct, treating strategy as the outcome of decisions made by managers responding to environmental pressures and organizational capabilities.

The mechanism chain developed in this book offers an alternative explanatory logic. It shows how strategic patterns can emerge without requiring comprehensive analysis, deliberate evaluation, or conscious selection. Experimentation generates variation not through systematic hypothesis testing, but through bounded trials undertaken under uncertainty. Stabilization retains solutions not through rigorous evaluation, but through recursive reinforcement of what proves workable in practice. Partial integration produces organizational form not through master planning but through local accommodations among heterogeneous elements. Mediated feedback shapes direction not through transparent cause-and-effect learning, but through inferential calibration under opacity.

Each mechanism operates with its own logic, yet their interaction produces coherent patterns of strategic adaptation. This explanatory approach aligns with recent calls for greater attention to mechanisms in strategy research (Rouleau et al., 2022; Valentine et al., 2024). It addresses a persistent gap between process descriptions that document emergence and theoretical explanations that account for how emergence occurs. By specifying the mechanisms through which strategy is produced, the framework provides a more precise account of strategic action under deep uncertainty.

This shift from choice to mechanism-based emergence has important theoretical implications. It suggests that strategy research should focus less on decision-making processes and more on the recursive dynamics through which strategic patterns are generated and sustained. It implies that strategic outcomes may be path-dependent not because of irreversible commitments, but because of the cumulative effects of recursive mechanisms that operate below the level of conscious deliberation. It opens space for understanding how firms can act strategically even when they lack the foresight, control, or analytical capacity that traditional theories assume.

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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