Lilla Hortoványi

Strategy Without Templates

Adaptation in Digital Environments

4 The Limits of Strategy: Why Templates No Longer Work

The preceding chapter established that in template-free environments, firms cannot rely on foresight as the primary basis of strategic action. Instead, they operate through experimentation, iterative feedback, and provisional stabilization. That argument, however, raises a deeper and more uncomfortable question. If experimentation increasingly replaces planning, then what exactly has happened to strategy as it has traditionally been understood? The answer cannot be reduced to a familiar claim about turbulence, complexity, or acceleration. Strategy theory has long acknowledged that firms face uncertainty, that environments evolve, and that adaptation matters. What is now at stake is more fundamental. The difficulty lies not simply in the degree of uncertainty, but in the weakening of the conditions that made classical strategic reasoning coherent in the first place.

This chapter, therefore, steps back from the question of how firms act and ask instead why the dominant strategic logic has become increasingly inadequate. Its central claim is that traditional strategy theory is built on a template-based logic. Across its major schools, strategy has relied on the assumption that successful patterns of action can be abstracted from experience, generalized beyond their original setting, and reapplied as meaningful guides for future behavior. Whether these patterns appear as positions, resource configurations, routines, or capabilities, they function as templates in the strong sense of the term: as reusable strategic models that reduce complexity by turning past success into a guide for present action.

The argument advanced here is that this logic no longer holds under conditions of digital mediation, platform governance, and infrastructural reconfiguration. In such environments, the structural conditions required for reusable strategic templates are progressively weakened. The rules of interaction are repeatedly reshaped. Visibility, access, and evaluation are mediated by opaque systems. Competitive structures do not simply evolve; they are recursively reorganized from within. Under these conditions, past success loses its reliability as a guide to future viability, and the transferability of strategic models becomes increasingly limited.

This does not imply that strategy disappears. On the contrary, the chapter argues that strategy remains indispensable, but it must be redefined. Before such a redefinition becomes possible, however, the limits of the inherited strategic logic must be made explicit. The chapter develops this argument in six steps. It begins by identifying the underlying assumptions of strategy as template-based logic. It then shows how replication breaks down when environmental structures are repeatedly reconfigured, specifies the mechanism through which templates dissolve, explains why benchmarking loses explanatory power under conditions of opacity, and shows how positioning becomes unstable in platform-mediated settings. It concludes by showing that both planning and strategic agency must be reconceptualized once templates no longer provide a reliable basis 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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