Lilla Hortoványi

Strategy Without Templates

Adaptation in Digital Environments

3.2 Why Organizational Learning Theory Is Not Enough

The inadequacy of foresight might suggest that organizational learning theory provides a sufficient alternative. However, this chapter argues that traditional learning frameworks are themselves insufficient under conditions of structural uncertainty.

Organizational learning theory typically assumes that repeated interaction with the environment leads to improved understanding, which can then guide future action (March, 1991). Learning is expected to reduce uncertainty by stabilizing relationships between action and outcome. Even when exploration is emphasized, it is ultimately positioned as a process that feeds into more reliable future behavior.

This logic depends on a critical condition: that the environment remains sufficiently stable for learning to accumulate.

In template-free environments, this condition is weakened. Learning does occur, but its stability is compromised. The problem is not the absence of feedback or experience. The problem is that the mapping between action and outcome is not durable. Algorithmic mediation, platform governance, and interdependent feedback loops continuously reshape selection criteria. As a result, learned relationships may decay rapidly or become context-specific in ways that limit transferability.

This creates a structural tension within learning processes. Exploration generates variation, but the selection environment itself is unstable. Exploitation becomes problematic because what is exploited may no longer be aligned with current conditions. The classic exploration–exploitation trade-off (March, 1991) assumes that exploitation builds on relatively stable knowledge. Under structural uncertainty, that assumption weakens.

Learning does not disappear. It becomes provisional. This leads to a crucial implication: firms cannot rely on learning alone to stabilize strategy. Instead, they must operate through continuous cycles of action and interpretation in which learning remains local, time-bound, and contingent. Experimentation, therefore, becomes necessary not because firms prefer it, but because learning alone cannot generate sufficiently stable guidance for action.

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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