Lilla Hortoványi

Strategy Without Templates

Adaptation in Digital Environments

12.2 Rethinking Strategic Practice

If strategy emerges through recursive mechanisms rather than deliberate design, then strategic practice must shift from planning to enabling. This shift, however, is more specific than a general call for flexibility or agility. It implies a distinct set of managerial demands that arise directly from the structural conditions identified in the preceding chapters: the absence of stable referents, the patchwork character of organizational form, the opacity of feedback, and the path-dependent accumulation of structure through experimental response.

The first demand concerns orientation under the absence of benchmarks. Because templates have lost their ontological foundation – because there is no common external reference structure through which action can be compared and validated – managers cannot evaluate their choices against stable standards of success. They must form provisional judgments, commit to directions they cannot fully justify in advance, and revise those commitments as outcomes become partially visible. This is not a failure of analysis; it is the structural condition of acting in environments where comparability itself has broken down.

The second demand concerns the management of patchwork structures. Because organizational form in digital environments accumulates through experimental responses rather than unified design, managers do not govern integrated systems. They coordinate heterogeneous elements that were not built to function as a whole – connecting components with different logics, managing interfaces between incompatible subsystems, and sustaining operability without achieving full alignment. The relevant managerial task is not optimization within a known architecture but continuous configuration of an architecture that is never finished.

The third demand concerns acting on signals that cannot be fully interpreted. Because feedback is algorithmically filtered and selectively surfaced, managers cannot read their environment directly. They work with mediated representations – platform metrics, recommendation signals, aggregated behavioral data – that reflect what the infrastructure makes visible rather than what is actually occurring. Strategic inference under these conditions requires forming provisional explanations, adjusting actions based on observed patterns rather than understood causes, and remaining willing to revise interpretations as signals shift.

In this sense, strategic practice becomes the orchestration of ongoing adaptation under conditions where stable reference points, clear evaluation criteria, and reliable causal understanding are absent. Experimentation is conducted without predefined benchmarks; what proves workable is reinforced even without fully understanding why it works; heterogeneous elements are connected without achieving full coherence; and responses are adjusted to evolving signals that remain only partially interpretable.

These demands place managers in a fundamentally different role than in traditional strategy settings. Rather than optimizing within known parameters, they must operate without stable benchmarks, making judgments under conditions where neither success criteria nor causal relationships are fully specified. They require comfort with ambiguity, tolerance for incompleteness, and acceptance that strategic direction emerges through ongoing adaptation rather than being set through upfront planning. This shifts the locus of managerial competence from analytical decision-making toward maintaining direction while continuously adjusting action: from capabilities for control and direction toward capabilities for orchestration and enabling, and from stable execution toward continuous recalibration.

What this book contributes to the understanding of managerial practice is not a new prescription but a new diagnosis. It specifies why the familiar tools of strategic management – positioning frameworks, capability audits, planning cycles – lose their traction in template-free environments, and it identifies the structural conditions that make a different kind of practice necessary. While existing constructs, such as entrepreneurial orientation, already capture elements like ambiguity tolerance or the ability to operate under resource constraints, they do not fully account for the challenges of managing patchwork structures and acting on partially interpretable signals.

Under these conditions, managerial effectiveness cannot be fully specified in advance; it can only be assessed retrospectively in terms of whether a viable trajectory has been sustained over time. The central question, therefore, becomes how managers sustain direction while continuously adjusting action as conditions evolve, and what capabilities enable such adaptive alignment in the absence of stable reference points.

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