Lilla Hortoványi

Strategy Without Templates

Adaptation in Digital Environments

3.5 Feedback, Selection, and Iteration

Experimentation is sustained through feedback mechanisms that are mediated, constitutive, and often opaque. In stable contexts, feedback can often be treated as a relatively direct signal of performance. In structured ecologies, feedback is filtered through algorithmic systems and infrastructural mediation. Visibility, engagement, and conversion are shaped not only by market demand but by platform logics (Rietveld et al., 2019).

Therefore, feedback is constitutive: it does not merely reflect outcomes; it shapes future possibilities. This creates interpretive uncertainty. Firms observe signals but cannot fully attribute causality. As a result, feedback does not eliminate uncertainty; it transforms it. Firms often conduct additional experiments to interpret prior feedback.

Selection becomes both intensified and destabilized. It is intensified because digital systems produce continuous signals. It is destabilized because selection criteria themselves evolve. What is rewarded today may be penalized tomorrow.

Iteration becomes the only viable response. Each cycle refines understanding without eliminating uncertainty. Strategy emerges not through definitive answers but through progressive alignment.

In this sense, iteration is not merely repetition. It is a mechanism for coping with ever changing selection criteria. Each cycle generates locally useful understanding, but that understanding remains provisional because the criteria of selection may shift before it can be generalized. Iteration, therefore, substitutes for foresight not by solving uncertainty, but by making action open to correction. Firms remain viable not because they know enough in advance, but because they can revise quickly enough in response to mediated feedback.

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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