Lilla Hortoványi

Strategy Without Templates

Adaptation in Digital Environments

4.7 Chapter Conclusion

The dominant strategic logic, developed across positioning, resource based, and planning traditions, rests on the assumption that environments exhibit sufficient structural stability for successful patterns to be identified, transferred, and reapplied. Replication, benchmarking, positioning, and planning all depend on this premise. When that premise weakens, the coherence of classical strategic logic no longer holds.

The argument developed in this chapter shows that this weakening does not stem from an increase in uncertainty alone. It reflects a transformation in the structure of the environment itself. In digitally mediated contexts, the conditions of action are continuously reshaped through platform governance, algorithmic mediation, infrastructural change, and ecosystem interdependence. As a result, the relationship between action and outcome becomes configuration specific, path dependent, and only partially observable.

Across the phenomena examined in this chapter, a common pattern emerges. Strategic effectiveness can no longer be detached from the historically accumulated, technologically mediated, and relationally embedded conditions under which it is produced. Replication becomes unreliable because the conditions of past success cannot be reproduced. Benchmarking becomes limited because performance differences cannot be causally interpreted. Positioning becomes unstable because competitive locations are continuously redefined. Planning, in turn, loses its predictive function and is reoriented toward enabling coordinated action under changing conditions.

The central theoretical contribution of the chapter is to make explicit that the decline of templates is not episodic but structural. Historically stabilized configurations no longer provide a reliable basis for action because the conditions that sustained them are continuously reconstituted. Strategy is, therefore, no longer about identifying universally reusable models of success. It is about explaining how firms construct viability in singular yet comparable ecologies whose structures are historically layered, technologically mediated, and recursively transformed.

This conclusion provides the bridge to the next chapter. If templates no longer guide action, and if strategy cannot be predefined through transferable models, then the central question becomes how firms generate referents of action in the first place. Chapter 5 addresses that problem by examining how strategic contexts become singularized and why stable strategic referents collapse under conditions of digital mediation.

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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