Lilla Hortoványi

Strategy Without Templates

Adaptation in Digital Environments

11.4.3 Strategic Orientation as Continuous Calibration

This mechanistic foundation generates a distinctive conception of strategic orientation. In template-free environments, strategic effectiveness depends not on achieving optimal configurations, but on sustaining adaptive movement through continuous calibration across multiple dimensions.

Firms must calibrate between experimentation and stabilization – generating enough variation to remain responsive while retaining enough structure to maintain operational coherence. Too much experimentation destabilizes core operations and exhausts resources. Too much stabilization creates rigidity and prevents adaptive response. The appropriate balance is not fixed but must be continuously adjusted based on resource availability, environmental volatility, and the degree of path dependence already accumulated.

Firms must calibrate between integration and fragmentation – maintaining enough coherence to preserve identity and coordinate action while tolerating enough inconsistency to accommodate heterogeneous elements that cannot be fully harmonized. This requires developing capabilities for interface management, modular coordination, and productive tolerance of contradiction rather than pursuing the complete alignment that configuration theory prescribes.

Firms must calibrate between autonomy and dependence – integrating deeply enough into platform ecosystems to access resources, markets, and infrastructure while preserving enough strategic room for maneuver to adapt when platform conditions change. This balance is inherently unstable because platforms can alter their governance structures unilaterally, forcing firms to continuously reassess and adjust their degree of ecosystem integration.

Firms must calibrate between action and interpretation, moving quickly enough to remain viable in fast-changing environments while developing sufficient understanding to guide adaptive response. This requires comfort with acting under incomplete knowledge, building working theories that are provisional and subject to revision, and maintaining the flexibility to change course when feedback reveals that current interpretations are inadequate.

These calibrations are not one-time choices but ongoing processes. They require capabilities for sensing when current balances are becoming misaligned, for adjusting organizational practices and resource allocations in response, and for maintaining strategic direction even as the specific balance across these dimensions continuously shifts. Strategic orientation thus becomes less about achieving a stable configuration and more about developing the sensitivity and flexibility necessary for continuous recalibration 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//

BibTeX EndNote Mendeley Zotero