Lilla Hortoványi

Strategy Without Templates

Adaptation in Digital Environments

5.2 The Loss of Comparability

Once firms no longer face functionally equivalent conditions of action, comparability itself becomes unstable. This has major implications for strategic reasoning because comparison has long served as one of its central cognitive and analytical operations. Firms compare themselves to competitors to assess relative performance, identify gaps, and infer what should be changed. Researchers compare firms to identify generalizable patterns. Consultants compare practices to derive recommendations. All of these operations presuppose that comparison links outcomes to sufficiently comparable underlying conditions.

In digitally mediated environments, this assumption weakens sharply. Firms may still observe differences in outcomes, but they can no longer assume that those differences arise from comparable strategic conditions. Performance may reflect differential algorithmic treatment, richer historical data, more favorable infrastructural integration, or stronger ecosystem positioning rather than superior strategic judgment alone. Outcome differences remain visible, but the mechanisms producing them are often only partially observable.

This creates what may be called an illusion of comparability. Firms appear to operate side by side, often on the same platform, within the same broad market category, and under the same visible rules. Yet the actual conditions of action differ in ways that matter strategically. Visible similarities conceal hidden non-equivalence. Under such conditions, benchmarking no longer provides a reliable guide to what should be learned or copied. Best practices no longer retain their classical meaning. Even apparently rational imitation can produce misalignment because what is imitated is the visible surface of success rather than the historically and infrastructurally embedded conditions that made it possible.

The fallacy of the average follows from the same logic. Aggregate benchmarks, median performance indicators, or representative strategic profiles no longer map onto any actual firm in a meaningful way when the environments firms inhabit are structurally differentiated. Statistical regularities may still be observable, but their interpretive value declines when the firms being averaged no longer share sufficiently comparable contexts. The problem is not that firms compare incorrectly. It is that comparison itself loses validity when strategic contexts are only superficially similar but structurally non-equivalent.

The issue is, therefore, not only that comparison becomes difficult, but that it becomes structurally misleading. Firms may appear comparable because they operate on the same platform or within the same market category, yet the conditions under which their actions are evaluated are not equivalent. What appears as better or worse strategy may instead reflect differentiated system responses. Under such conditions, comparison no longer reveals underlying mechanisms but obscures them.

The key implication is that the system does not expose firms to a common set of conditions. Instead, it actively differentiates the conditions under which firms operate. Visibility, access, evaluation, and feedback are shaped in firm-specific ways. As a result, firms no longer face a shared reference structure against which performance can be meaningfully compared.

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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