Lilla Hortoványi

Strategy Without Templates

Adaptation in Digital Environments

5.4 Strategies Without External Referents

If templates cannot form and comparability weakens, the strategic problem changes fundamentally. Firms can no longer rely on external referents in the classical sense. Industry standards, representative competitors, and visible best practices no longer provide a dependable basis for defining action. Strategy, therefore, shifts from model adoption to contextual enactment. The relevant question is no longer what works in general, but what becomes viable within a specific firm’s own evolving conditions.

This shift does not imply the disappearance of structure, nor does it imply pure improvisation. On the contrary, strategy remains structured, but the relevant structure is no longer externalized as a stable template. It is constituted within the interaction between the firm and its mediated environment. Strategic reasoning, therefore, becomes more self-referential in a precise sense. Firms must understand how their own visibility, data histories, infrastructural dependencies, and ecosystem relationships condition the range of viable action available to them.

This changes the nature of strategic learning. Learning can no longer rely primarily on copying visible practices or aligning with external benchmarks. It must proceed through interpretation, probing, adjustment, and reconfiguration within the firm’s own context. What counts as a strategically valid move is not established by conformity to an external standard, but by whether it contributes to a configuration that remains viable under the firm’s specific conditions. Strategy thus becomes a process of constructing coherence under non-transferable and only partially comparable circumstances.

The analytical implication is equally important. The relevant unit of analysis is no longer the abstract strategy as a portable set of choices, but the firm-environment configuration through which strategic action becomes possible. Strategic effectiveness cannot be attributed solely to what the firm chooses in isolation. It must be understood in relation to the mediated, historical, and infrastructural conditions under which those choices are enacted.

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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