Lilla Hortoványi

Strategy Without Templates

Adaptation in Digital Environments

5.3 Mechanisms of Firm Specific Differentiation

The previous sections established that firms in digital environments no longer operate under sufficiently shared conditions for templates to form. The next step is to specify more precisely how these differentiated conditions are produced. Three mutually reinforcing mechanisms are especially important: recursive feedback amplification, behavioral shaping through system signals, and infrastructural embedding. Together, they explain why firms that appear initially comparable may become progressively more distinct over time.

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Figure 1 Differentiation of strategic conditions over time

Source: Author’s own elaboration.

The three mechanisms illustrated in Figure 1 operate together to progressively differentiate firm-specific conditions of action. Importantly, the figure does not depict a simple process of cumulative advantage or standard path dependence. Rather, differentiation is co-produced through the interaction between firm behavior and system response. Firms are not only accumulating advantages; they are differentially modeled, signaled to, and constrained by the systems through which they operate. As a result, divergence emerges even when firms pursue similar strategies, and this divergence becomes increasingly difficult to reverse. The figure clarifies the central claim of this chapter: strategic contexts do not simply differ – they are actively and recursively differentiated.

First, recursive feedback amplification. Algorithmic systems continuously update their treatment of firms on the basis of performance signals. Early visibility can generate more user attention, which generates richer interaction data, which in turn improves the system’s ability to classify, rank, and surface the firm. Lower initial visibility can produce the opposite effect, leaving the firm with thinner data traces and weaker system legibility (Gregory et al., 2021). This is more than cumulative advantage in a simple sense. The crucial point is that the system learns differently about different firms. Some become easier for the platform to interpret and support; others remain partially opaque. Over time, small differences can, therefore, be amplified into strategically significant divergence.

Second, behavioral shaping through system signals. Platforms do not merely observe behavior; they cue and channel it. Dashboards, seller metrics, ranking shifts, pricing prompts, recommendation outcomes, and other system signals indicate what kinds of actions are rewarded. Firms respond to these signals, and repeated exposure to them gradually shapes patterns of firm behavior. Importantly, firms do not receive identical signals. They receive signals, conditional on their own prior performance, inferred relevance, and platform position (Kellogg et al., 2020). As a result, firms adapt to partially different evaluative environments even when they operate on the same platform. Their strategic behavior is not only self-determined, but co-shaped by the system’s differentiated responses.

Third, infrastructural embedding. As firms integrate more deeply with platform architectures, analytics systems, fulfillment arrangements, payment infrastructures, and data interfaces, they develop capabilities that are valuable within those configurations but difficult to detach from them (Tilson et al., 2010). This does not simply create switching costs. It creates configuration-specific fit. Processes, routines, and managerial attention become aligned with a particular technical architecture and ecosystem arrangement. The firm’s strategy becomes inseparable from the infrastructure through which it is enacted. Replacing that infrastructure would require not only technical substitution, but organizational reconfiguration.

These mechanisms interact. Recursive feedback amplifies initial differences, system signals shape firm behavior in actor-specific ways, and infrastructural embedding locks those trajectories into progressively more differentiated configurations. The result is that each firm’s strategic context becomes unique, even within the same system. This does not mean that firms become incomparable in every respect, nor that no common features remain. It means that the differences that matter strategically increasingly arise from firm-specific histories, system responses, and infrastructural couplings rather than from deviations around a shared baseline.

The chapter’s central contribution follows from this point. Templates fail not because firms differ in the ordinary sense, but because the environment itself no longer presents them with sufficiently equivalent conditions for shared standards to stabilize. What used to appear as industry level order increasingly gives way to firm-specific conditions of visibility, access, evaluation, and interaction. Once this occurs, template-based reasoning loses its foundation.

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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