Lilla Hortoványi

Strategy Without Templates

Adaptation in Digital Environments

1 Introduction

The contemporary organizational landscape is undergoing a transformation that is often described as technological change, yet this description remains too narrow. Digital tools, platforms, and data infrastructures are undeniably central to the current reorganization of economic life, but the deeper shift lies not in the tools themselves, but in the nature of the environment within which firms act. For decades, management theory largely treated the digital as an instrument, that is, as a set of technologies to be integrated into existing organizational and strategic frameworks in order to improve efficiency, coordination, innovation, or market reach. In this view, digitalization remained subordinate to strategy. Firms chose how to use digital tools, and strategy retained conceptual priority as the organizing logic through which those tools were deployed.

This book takes a different position. It argues that digitalization has evolved beyond the status of a tool and has become a condition. By condition, I mean an encompassing and dynamically evolving environment that shapes, constrains, and reorganizes strategic actions themselves. This distinction is not merely semantic. It marks a transition from a world in which firms could rely on relatively stable strategic templates to one in which such templates are structurally absent. In digital environments, strategy is no longer formed against a stable backdrop and then implemented through organizational design. It emerges through ongoing reconfiguration under constraints that are themselves changing.

This shift has consequences that reach far beyond the topic of digital transformation. It challenges some of the most basic assumptions of strategic management. Traditional strategic theories, whether centered on positioning, resources, or capabilities, differ in important respects, but they share a common premise: that environments, even when turbulent, exhibit enough regularity to allow firms to analyze patterns, identify durable sources of advantage, and align action with predictable structures (Porter, 1980; Barney, 1991; Teece et al., 1997). The claim advanced in this book is that this premise becomes increasingly difficult to sustain in digitally mediated environments. What is at stake is not simply that the environment changes faster. The deeper issue is that the conditions required for stable strategic referents, reusable models, and cumulative learning are progressively weakened.

From Tool to Condition

The dominant narrative in both academic and practitioner discourse frames digitalization as a trend, a wave of disruption that will eventually settle into a new equilibrium. Such interpretations implicitly assume that once the transition is complete, a new set of dominant models, routines, or best practices will emerge. Firms may face temporary turbulence, but the expectation remains that strategic order will be restored. However, this assumption is increasingly difficult to maintain.

Recent work on digital platforms and ecosystems suggests that the digital environment is not converging toward stability but is instead defined by persistent fluidity, layered complexity, and recursive restructuring (Poniatowski et al., 2020). Digital multi-sided platforms operate across multiple levels of abstraction and continuously reconfigure relationships among actors, resources, and markets. As a result, the environment does not reliably offer stable reference points that firms can imitate or adopt. Instead, it constitutes what this book conceptualizes as a template-free environment.

To understand such environments, it is insufficient to rely on strategic frameworks that presuppose a relatively stable context. As Marton (2021) argues, digital systems are better approached through an ecological lens. In a digital ecology, the environment is not a passive backdrop but an active and evolving structure that shapes the conditions of action. Platforms, in this sense, function as foundational architectures that organize economic activity while remaining outside the direct control of individual firms (Cennamo et al., 2022). They define conditions of visibility, access, interaction, and participation, thereby structuring the strategic space in which firms operate.

The conceptual move from tool to condition, therefore, changes the status of strategy itself. If digitalization is treated as a tool, then strategy precedes it. Firms formulate objectives and then decide how digital technologies can serve them. If digitalization is treated as a condition, then strategy no longer stands outside the environment that it seeks to shape. Instead, it is formed within an evolving system whose rules are only partially visible, unevenly distributed, and continuously reconfigured. Under such circumstances, strategy cannot simply be the intentional design of action in relation to an analyzable world. It becomes a process of constructing viability within a world whose structures are themselves in motion.

Why Existing Strategy Theory Becomes Insufficient

This book does not argue that the major traditions of strategy theory are wrong in any simple or absolute sense. Their core assumptions remain coherent in environments that approximate the structural conditions under which they were developed. The problem is that these assumptions become increasingly strained in digital settings.

Positioning theory, for example, assumes that industry structures remain sufficiently stable for firms to analyze the competitive landscape, identify defensible positions, and align activities accordingly (Porter, 1980). Yet, in platform-mediated environments, the architecture of competition itself is repeatedly reconfigured. Positions may be undermined before they can stabilize, not because firms miscalculate, but because the structure within which positioning takes place changes during the process.

The resource-based view similarly assumes that valuable resources can sustain advantage when they are rare, difficult to imitate, and durable (Barney, 1991). In digital environments, however, value and durability increasingly diverge. Resources may create temporary value, but their strategic usefulness can be rapidly altered by platform redesign, interface changes, algorithmic shifts, or the commoditization of digital functionality. The issue is not that resources no longer matter, but that their value may no longer persist long enough to support the logic of sustained advantage in its classical form.

Dynamic capabilities theory extended strategy by emphasizing the firm’s capacity to sense, seize, and transform under changing conditions (Teece et al., 1997; Teece, 2007). This represented a major advance beyond static models. Yet, even this framework presupposes that capabilities can be built, stabilized, and exercised through repeated practice. In rapidly reconfiguring digital settings, the time required for capability accumulation may be compressed to the point where stabilization becomes difficult. Firms may be forced to act before routines mature, adapt before learning consolidates, and reconfigure before capabilities become durable.

These tensions do not invalidate traditional theories. Rather, they reveal the limits of a broader stability assumption that cuts across them. Whether the focal unit is position, resource, or capability, the dominant logic of strategy assumes that some meaningful continuity exists between past patterns and future action. The argument of this book is that digital environments increasingly erode this continuity.

Mechanisms of Template Absence

The absence of templates is not simply a descriptive statement about uncertainty or novelty. It is the outcome of specific structural mechanisms that prevents stable, generalizable strategic models from forming. Three such mechanisms are particularly important.

The first is continuous architectural reconfiguration. Digital platforms and infrastructures do not merely host interaction; they periodically restructure the conditions under which interaction occurs. Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are revised, governance rules are adjusted, visibility regimes are recalibrated, and boundary resources are opened or restricted. These changes can invalidate previously successful strategies even when firms have executed them well. What is destabilized is not only the outcome, but the underlying possibility of building a stable best practice. If the architecture of participation remains fluid, no strategic model can reliably mature into a durable template.

The second mechanism is algorithmic mediation combined with opacity. Key strategic outcomes such as visibility, discoverability, ranking, and access are increasingly shaped by computational systems whose logic is only partially visible to participants. Firms can observe outcomes, but they often cannot fully understand the causal processes that produced them. This weakens the possibility of benchmarking, imitation, and even cumulative learning. Strategic action must increasingly proceed without transparent knowledge of the operative rules that structure success.

The third mechanism is ecosystem interdependence. Firms in digital environments do not compete only against direct rivals within fixed industry boundaries. They operate in tightly coupled systems in which the actions of platform owners, complementors, users, regulators, and adjacent actors can rapidly reshape strategic possibilities (Madhok et al., 2022). Outcomes depend not only on what the firm does, but on how other actors respond and how the architecture of the ecosystem transmits those responses. Under such conditions, strategic results cannot be attributed to the firm alone, and stable equilibria become difficult to sustain.

These mechanisms do not operate independently. Architectural fluidity increases the significance of algorithmic mediation, algorithmic opacity magnifies the uncertainty created by interdependence, and ecosystem coupling amplifies the impact of reconfiguration. Together, they generate environments in which templates are not merely missing, but structurally difficult to form.

Strategy Without Stability

If the environment is no longer stable in the sense presupposed by traditional strategy theory, then strategy cannot be understood primarily as a plan. The classical view of strategy assumes that firms can define positions, allocate resources, and pursue long-term objectives on the basis of reasonably predictable conditions. In template-free environments, these assumptions weaken.

This does not mean that firms stop planning, or that strategy dissolves into improvisation. Rather, it means that strategy can no longer be reduced to the implementation of predefined models. Instead, it becomes a process of continuous reconfiguration. Firms do not simply execute prior designs; they construct and reconstruct strategic paths through ongoing adjustment to shifting conditions. This process is not driven by complete foresight, but by adaptive mechanisms through which organizations respond to emerging constraints and possibilities in real time (Nikolaiev & Cherniavska, 2021).

This shift is particularly visible in platform-based ecosystems, where firms must navigate changing technological interfaces, unstable market configurations, and evolving governance rules. Innovation in such contexts is not confined to a clearly bounded domain but often spans multiple categories, requiring recombination, repositioning, and cross-domain movement (Sun et al., 2025). At the same time, firms operate under conditions of algorithmic mediation, where visibility, pricing, customer access, and demand formation are shaped by opaque computational systems (Ramizo, 2021). These systems do not merely transmit information. They structure strategic opportunity itself and, in doing so, redefine the limits of strategic agency.

What follows from this is a different view of strategic action. Strategy is no longer best understood as the optimization of fit within a stable environment, but as the ongoing assembly of viable configurations under structurally evolving conditions. The question is no longer simply how firms choose the right strategy, but how they construct and stabilize action when the environment does not supply enduring templates.

Toward a Theory of Template-Free Strategy

The central claim of this book is that we are entering an era of strategy without templates. This does not imply the absence of structure, nor does it imply that organizations act without pattern or direction. It implies something more specific and more consequential: the absence of stable, generalizable models that firms can adopt as reliable guides to action.

Instead of following predefined strategic paths, organizations increasingly construct their strategies through processes such as experimentation without foresight, the provisional stabilization of temporary solutions, selective system integration, and adaptation to algorithmically mediated feedback. These processes do not unfold in a vacuum. They are shaped by technological, organizational, and structural constraints that both enable and limit action. As a result, firms often move along paths that are not the outcome of deliberate optimization, but of constrained adjustment, partial learning, and historically conditioned responses. Temporary solutions become stabilized, fragmented systems persist, and early decisions shape future possibilities in ways that are difficult to reverse.

Therefore, the theoretical ambition of this book is not to offer a new managerial toolkit or an updated list of best practices. Its purpose is to develop a conceptual framework for understanding strategy when the very conditions that made best practices possible are weakening. It shifts the focus from strategy as planning to strategy as adaptive reconfiguration, and from digitalization as a tool to digital environments as a condition. In doing so, it offers an alternative to the dominant transformation narrative, one that recognizes the patchwork, emergent, and constrained character of strategic action in contemporary organizations.

This alternative is not anti-strategy. On the contrary, it seeks to recover strategy as a meaningful object of analysis precisely by freeing it from assumptions that no longer hold universally. Rather than asking how firms can design the optimal strategy for a known environment, the book asks how strategic action is constructed, stabilized, and transformed when the environment itself remains structurally unsettled. In this sense, the problem is not whether strategy still matters, but how strategy must be reconceptualized once stability can no longer be assumed.

The chapters that follow develop this argument systematically. They begin by rethinking the environment itself, then move to the problem of experimentation under structural uncertainty, and from there to the mechanisms through which firms provisionally stabilize action without relying on templates. The aim throughout is not to describe digital change as a fashionable disruption, but to explain how it alters the underlying conditions of strategic thought.

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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