Lilla Hortoványi

Strategy Without Templates

Adaptation in Digital Environments

5.1 From Shared Standards to Firm Specific Contexts: The Limits of Templates

The collapse of templates in digital environments is not accidental. It arises from structural processes that systematically prevent the stabilization of shared strategic patterns. Three processes are particularly important here: algorithmic differentiation, path-dependent conditioning, and the weakening of stable category boundaries. Together, they explain why firms may appear to operate in the same market while facing materially different conditions of action.

The first process is algorithmic differentiation. In platform-mediated settings, visibility, access, ranking, and recommendation are shaped through algorithmic systems that respond to firm-specific data, prior performance, interaction histories, and inferred relevance (Alaimo & Kallinikos, 2021; Gregory et al., 2021; Kellogg et al., 2020). These systems do not apply a single transparent rule equally across actors. Instead, they generate differentiated responses conditional on each firm’s accumulated trajectory within the system. Two firms may offer similar products and pursue similar visible practices, yet still encounter different conditions of exposure, evaluation, and customer reach because the system processes them differently. Under such conditions, a shared rule structure gives way to a distributed and conditional one.

The second process is path-dependent conditioning. Digital environments do not treat the present as a neutral moment. Past actions, data traces, engagement histories, and prior adjustments are carried forward into current conditions through metrics, scoring systems, and algorithmic feedback (Pentland et al., 2022; Kim et al., 2025). This means that the strategic environment a firm encounters is partly shaped by what it has already done. Present opportunities are, therefore, not uniformly available across actors but filtered through historically accumulated differences. A firm’s current room for action reflects not only its present choice set, but the sedimented effects of its earlier interactions with the system. What looks like a common present is thus already differentiated by history.

The third process is the weakening of stable category boundaries. Digital ecosystems recombine functions across domains such as commerce, logistics, finance, media, and infrastructure, making it increasingly difficult to locate firms within stable and coherent categories (Jacobides et al., 2018; Jacobides et al., 2021). Firms often operate across overlapping layers of value creation and interface with multiple systems simultaneously. Under these conditions, the very category within which a firm is to be compared becomes unstable. If the boundaries of the field are unclear, then industry standards become harder to define, and comparison becomes more fragile as an epistemic operation.

These three processes jointly undermine the conditions under which templates could form. Templates require sufficiently shared rules, comparable contexts, and stable categories for successful patterns to become visible and generalizable. In digitally mediated environments, these conditions are continually weakened. What remains are local and historically specific configurations that may be viable under particular conditions but cannot be abstracted into generally reusable models. The absence of templates is, therefore, not a temporary gap in knowledge, but a structurally reproduced consequence of how digital environments organize action.

The argument now moves from the limits of transfer to the limits of formation. The previous chapter showed why strategies cannot be reliably replicated across contexts. The present chapter explains why those contexts themselves no longer stabilize into shared reference conditions. The focus, therefore, shifts from why templates fail to travel to why they cannot emerge in the first place.

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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