Lilla Hortoványi

Strategy Without Templates

Adaptation in Digital Environments

5 The Absence of Templates: The Collapse of Industry Standards

While the previous chapter established the boundary conditions under which template-based strategy begins to fail, this chapter advances a stronger claim: not only do templates fail to guide action, but the conditions required for their formation are systematically undermined. The central claim developed here is that digital environments undermine the very conditions under which industry standards, best practices, and comparable strategic referents could once emerge. Templates collapse not merely because the environment becomes more uncertain, but because firms no longer operate under sufficiently shared conditions for common standards to stabilize. Even within the same system, each firm’s strategic context increasingly becomes unique.

In the classical strategic tradition, firms were assumed to operate within bounded and broadly comparable environments. Industry structures, dominant designs, and best practices served as shared reference points that made comparison meaningful and strategic learning possible. Whether expressed through positioning logic, institutional isomorphism, or planning based approaches, the underlying assumption was similar: firms acted within a common field in which performance differences could be interpreted and successful practices could be abstracted and reapplied. Strategy was, therefore, relational in a specific sense. Firms positioned themselves relative to identifiable competitors, evaluated themselves against visible benchmarks, and interpreted success through shared categories of comparison.

This logic presupposed that the competitive environment functioned as a relatively stable container. Industry boundaries were sufficiently clear, product categories sufficiently coherent, and customer expectations sufficiently patterned to make generalization possible. Under such conditions, firms could reason strategically through representative competitors, recurrent patterns, and transferable models. Industry standards did not eliminate variation, but they stabilized it enough for successful patterns to become visible, interpretable, and reusable.

In digitally mediated environments, this stabilizing container weakens. Firms no longer enter a bounded field defined by common conditions but engage with infrastructures that mediate interaction in ways that are adaptive, actor specific, and continuously evolving (Faraj et al., 2022; Gawer, 2021; Marton, 2021). The environment remains highly structured, but it no longer structures firms in the same way. Platform governance, algorithmic ranking, data feedback, infrastructural integration, and ecosystem interdependence alter the conditions of action unevenly across firms. As a result, visibility, access, and performance are not distributed through common rules that all actors encounter in equivalent form.

This is the chapter’s starting point. The absence of templates is not simply the absence of order. It is the consequence of a different mode of order, one that continuously differentiates conditions across firms rather than stabilizing them into a common strategic field. Once firms no longer face sufficiently shared conditions, industry standards lose their role as meaningful referents. The problem is, therefore, not only that firms cannot copy what others do. It is that the external standards against which strategic action was once interpreted no longer exist in a form that is collectively stable, comparable, and transferable.

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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