Lilla Hortoványi

Strategy Without Templates

Adaptation in Digital Environments

12.1 What Strategy Becomes Without Templates

This book began with a question: What happens to strategy when templates disappear? The answer developed across ten chapters is that strategy does not disappear. It transforms. It becomes construction rather than selection, calibration rather than control, orchestration rather than design, and learning rather than prediction as the primary mode of adaptation. This transformation is not a weakening of strategy, but a fundamental reconceptualization of what strategy is and how it operates.

That reconceptualization rests on a chain of arguments developed in sequence. Chapter 2 showed that digital environments do not merely intensify familiar forms of uncertainty – they undermine the four foundational assumptions on which classical strategy has always rested: that the environment is external to the firm, that it is sufficiently transparent to be read before action, that firm and environment can be analytically separated, and that competitive contexts tend toward states stable enough for strategic analysis to occur. When these four conditions erode together, the environment can no longer serve as a legible backdrop against which firms position themselves. It becomes a structured ecology – partially visible, continuously reconfigured, and co-produced through the very actions firms take within it.

Chapter 3 demonstrated that when the environment cannot be read in advance, foresight cannot serve as the primary basis for strategic action. Firms do not abandon planning or reflection, but they can no longer ground strategic commitments in the assumption that relevant conditions will remain stable long enough for prior analysis to guide outcomes. Experimentation enters not as a managerial preference but as a structural necessity – the only mechanism through which knowledge can be generated when it cannot be acquired before action begins.

Chapter 4 then made explicit what this means for the strategic traditions that have shaped the field. The dominant logic of strategy – across positioning, resource-based, and planning approaches – rests on a template-based premise: that successful configurations can be identified, codified, and transferred. Replication, benchmarking, and deliberate positioning all depend on that premise. Chapter 4 showed that this premise does not merely weaken under digital conditions; it loses its ontological foundation. The relationship between action and outcome becomes configuration-specific, path-dependent, and only partially observable. Strategy can no longer be about identifying universally reusable models of success.

Chapter 5 extended this argument by showing that the collapse of templates is not a firm-level failure of analysis but a structural consequence of how digital environments organize action. Industry standards, shared categories, and comparable competitors – the conditions that once allowed successful patterns to stabilize into transferable templates – are systematically undermined when firms operate under increasingly differentiated, algorithm-mediated, and ecosystem-embedded conditions. Even within the same platform system, firms face contexts that are only partially comparable. Templates lose not just their practical utility but their ontological basis: there is no longer a common external reference structure through which strategic action can be interpreted, compared, and transferred.

Chapters 6 through 9 then traced the positive mechanisms through which strategy takes shape under these conditions. Chapter 6 showed that firms generate strategic direction through enacted experimentation – recursive cycles of action, feedback, interpretation, and adjustment in which knowledge is produced through engagement with the environment rather than acquired prior to it. Chapter 7 revealed that this process is not one of permanent fluidity. Temporary experimental responses become durable organizational structures through a sequence of retention, repetition, coherence-building, architectural coupling, and formalization. What persists is not necessarily what is optimal, but what has become viable, repeatable, and difficult to remove – a layered architecture that reflects the history of constraint as much as the logic of design.

Chapter 8 showed that the result of this accumulation is rarely a fully integrated system. Digital organizations function as patchwork configurations: heterogeneous elements combined and coordinated without forming a unified whole, where fragmentation and modularity are not signs of failure but structural features of viable organizing. Chapter 9 completed this picture by showing that feedback in digital environments does not close the loop between intention and outcome. Firms receive abundant signals, but those signals are selectively surfaced, algorithmically filtered, and shaped by infrastructures outside their control. Strategic learning, therefore, depends not on transparent cause-and-effect relationships but on provisional inference, pattern-based adjustment, and continuous calibration under epistemic opacity.

Chapter 10 integrated these mechanisms into a coherent strategic orientation, showing that experimentation, stabilization, patchwork coherence, and algorithmic calibration are not separate managerial concerns but interdependent dimensions of a single adaptive logic – one that is oriented toward viability rather than optimal alignment, and toward sustaining movement under constraint rather than achieving equilibrium.

The implications of this reconceptualization extend beyond academic theory. They reshape how we understand strategic practice, how we evaluate strategic effectiveness, and how we conceive the role of theory itself in environments where the epistemic conditions of classical strategy no longer hold. The following sections develop these implications in turn, focusing on how strategy is enacted, how effectiveness is defined, and how theory must be repositioned under template-free conditions.

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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