Lilla Hortoványi

Strategy Without Templates

Adaptation in Digital Environments

4.6 The End of Design: Planning, Agency, and Strategy Without Templates

Traditional strategic planning is built on the assumption that firms can project future states based on current knowledge and past experience (Ansoff, 1965). This presupposes that the environment exhibits sufficient regularity for causal patterns to be identified and extrapolated. Planning, in this sense, is a predictive exercise. It seeks to define a desired future state and map a sequence of actions through which that state can be reached.

Under conditions of structural uncertainty, this logic becomes increasingly untenable. Digital environments are characterized not only by dynamism, but by non-linear interaction, cross-domain recombination, infrastructural reconfiguration, and algorithmically mediated feedback loops that cannot be reliably inferred from past patterns (Hinings et al., 2018; Vial, 2019). The issue is not simply that forecasting becomes harder. Rather, the relationship between present conditions and future outcomes becomes unstable because the structures that mediate this relationship are themselves evolving.

This does not eliminate the need for planning, but it fundamentally changes its function. Planning can no longer serve primarily as a mechanism for determining outcomes in advance. Instead, it becomes a form of provision for coordinated action under uncertainty. Rather than specifying a fixed trajectory, it establishes the conditions under which coordinated action remains possible despite uncertainty. This involves creating minimal structures for alignment, allocating resources flexibly, and preserving sufficient latitude for adjustment as conditions evolve.

As the role of planning changes, so does the nature of strategic agency. In classical frameworks, the strategist is understood as a planner or visionary. In the former, strategy is conceived as the outcome of deliberate analysis, model selection, and organizational alignment; in the latter, it is framed as the realization of a predefined future state. Both presume that the environment can be sufficiently understood prior to action. In digital environments, that assumption no longer holds. The strategist cannot rely on a stable representation of the environment as a basis for envisioning because the relevant structures are only partially visible and continuously evolving.

Under such conditions, strategic agencies shift from design to wayfinding. Wayfinding is not the execution of a fully specified plan but movement through an environment that cannot be comprehensively mapped in advance. It proceeds through situated interpretation, incremental adjustment, and continuous engagement with emerging signals (Marton, 2021). The strategist does not define a complete path at the outset, but constructs it step by step, responding to feedback and reorienting as conditions change.

This shift reflects a deeper epistemic transformation. Strategy is no longer grounded in knowledge that precedes action, but in knowledge that is generated through action. Rather than knowing, then choosing, then acting, firms increasingly act in order to know. This does not eliminate analysis. It relocates it within an iterative process of probing, interpreting, and reconfiguring. Strategic competence, therefore, lies not in predictive accuracy, but in the capacity to generate, interpret, and act upon emerging information while maintaining directional coherence.

The practical implication is not the abandonment of agency, but its redefinition. Agency becomes more central precisely because no predefined templates or trajectories can be relied upon. It must sustain coordinated movement under conditions where neither the destination nor the route can be specified with finality. Although strategy remains intentional, intentionality is enacted through provisional commitments, revisable interpretations, and the disciplined maintenance of flexibility in action.

Therefore, a different theoretical foundation is required. The limitations identified in this chapter do not imply that strategy becomes obsolete. Rather, they indicate that its dominant conceptualization – as the selection and implementation of transferable models – must be replaced by an understanding of strategy as an ongoing process of coordinated action under structural uncertainty.

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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