Lilla Hortoványi

Strategy Without Templates

Adaptation in Digital Environments

3 Limits of Foresight: When Strategy Becomes Experimental

If Chapter 2 reconceptualized the environment as a structured, template-free ecology, Chapter 3 addresses the necessary next question: how do firms act under such conditions? The task of this chapter is not to restate that the environment has become unstable, but to explain what replaces foresight when its epistemic and practical sufficiency breaks down under conditions of structural uncertainty.

This claim requires careful specification. It does not imply that firms abandon planning, reflection, or commitment. Rather, it implies that strategic action can no longer be grounded in the assumption that relevant goals, means, and environmental conditions are fully knowable in advance. Instead, firms construct viable courses of action through recursive engagement with a system that is only partially visible and continuously evolving in response to their own actions and those of others.

The chapter develops this argument in five steps.

It shows why foresight loses its ability to reliably guide action under structural uncertainty.
It reconceptualizes experimentation as a persistent and constitutive mode of action rather than a temporary technique.
It demonstrates that experimentation is distributed across organizational and interorganizational sites.
It analyzes how feedback, selection, and iteration operate under algorithmic mediation.
It examines how experimentation produces provisional forms of stabilization in the form of routines, while simultaneously generating residues and constraints that shape future adaptation.

Strategy is reframed here not as a foresight-driven choice, but as an ongoing process of experimentally constructed action under structural constraint. The unifying logic is mechanism-based: experimentation is not a managerial preference but a structurally induced mode of action that emerges when learning cannot stabilize and foresight cannot reliably guide decision-making.

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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