Lilla Hortoványi

Strategy Without Templates

Adaptation in Digital Environments

4.3.4 The Impossibility of Best Practice

The breakdown of transferability also destabilizes the concept of best practice. Classical management theory assumes that superior practices can be identified, abstracted from their original setting, and adopted elsewhere with broadly similar effects. That assumption presupposes decontextualizability, that practices retain their functional properties across contexts.

Under configurational divergence, this assumption weakens because the effectiveness of a practice depends on the configuration in which it is embedded. What appears as a best practice is not a self-contained solution but the visible outcome of a particular alignment of histories, infrastructures, and relationships. Once separated from that configuration, its effectiveness becomes uncertain and often collapses.

While best practices cannot be directly transferred in digital environments, they remain a valuable source of insight because they demonstrate viability under specific conditions. They indicate that a particular combination of actions, resources, sequencing, and relationships has worked somewhere, without revealing directly why it worked. Their value lies in enabling inference: firms can use observed practices to infer missing conditions, reconstruct how elements interact within a configuration, and consider how different combinations might be assembled under their own constraints. This process proceeds through reconstruction and testing, as firms reassemble elements in ways that match their own constraints and then examine how these combinations perform in their specific context. The outcomes of these efforts provide feedback on whether a configuration is viable under given conditions, rather than on the effectiveness of individual or original actions. Studying best practices matters because it helps uncover the conditions under which particular configurations become viable, thereby enabling configuration-specific learning.

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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