Lilla Hortoványi

Strategy Without Templates

Adaptation in Digital Environments

11.4.2 Recursive Mechanisms as Generative Structure

The mechanism chain provides the structural foundation for this constructionist view. It shows that strategy emerges not through conscious design, but through the recursive interaction of mechanisms that operate with their own logics yet produce coherent patterns through their interdependence.

Experimentation generates variation by introducing new practices, technologies, relationships, and organizational arrangements. This variation is not random, but it is not fully designed either. Firms experiment under constraint – bounded by resource limitations, cognitive capacity, institutional pressures, and prior commitments. Experiments are typically small, local, and provisional. Yet their cumulative effect can be substantial when successful variations stabilize and spread.

Stabilization operates through recursive mechanisms that retain workable solutions without requiring comprehensive evaluation. When an experimental practice proves functional – when it solves a problem, enables coordination, or generates acceptable outcomes – it tends to be repeated. Repetition creates familiarity, builds supporting infrastructure, and generates increasing returns. Over time, what began as provisional becomes structural not because it was optimal, but because it became entrenched through recursive use. This process differs from path dependence as traditionally conceived (Sydow et al., 2009). Path dependence emphasizes lock-in through increasing returns to a specific technology or practice. Recursive stabilization operates more broadly, retaining heterogeneous solutions that emerge from multiple experiments conducted under different constraints and at different times.

Partial integration assembles these stabilized elements into organizational form. Because the elements originate from different experiments, serve different purposes, and operate according to different logics, they cannot be fully harmonized into a coherent whole. Integration, therefore, remains partial, elements are connected through workable interfaces, coordinated through local accommodations, and held together through narrative coherence rather than structural unity. This patchwork form is not a transitional disorder. It is the organizational structure that emerges when adaptation proceeds through experimentation and stabilization rather than through comprehensive design.

Mediated feedback shapes the direction of further adaptation by providing signals about what is working and what is not. Yet because feedback is filtered through algorithmic systems, platform architectures, and ecosystem dynamics, it does not offer transparent causal information. Firms must interpret opaque signals, form working theories about their meaning, and calibrate behavior through inferential adjustment. This learning process is iterative and provisional – firms act, observe effects, revise their interpretations, and adjust their actions in an ongoing cycle of adaptive calibration.

The power of this mechanism chain lies in its capacity to explain how strategic order emerges without requiring the foresight, control, or causal understanding that traditional theories assume. Each mechanism operates locally and recursively. Yet their interaction produces macro-level patterns that exhibit coherence and directionality even though no actor designed or controls the overall system. This is emergence in the technical sense – the whole exhibits properties that cannot be reduced to or predicted from the properties of individual mechanisms operating in isolation (Goldstein, 1999).

This emergent quality is what makes the framework’s integration its primary source of novelty. The individual mechanisms are not entirely new – experimentation, path dependence, organizational patchwork, and opaque feedback have all been studied before. What is novel is showing how these mechanisms interact to produce a distinctive strategic logic suited to template-free environments. Experimentation without stabilization would produce chaos. Stabilization without experimentation would produce rigidity. Integration without feedback would produce isolated fragments. Feedback without integration would provide signals with no organizational capacity to respond. It is the recursive interaction among all four mechanisms that generates viable strategic order under conditions where traditional approaches fail.

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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