Lilla Hortoványi

Strategy Without Templates

Adaptation in Digital Environments

5.6 Chapter Conclusion

This chapter argues that the absence of templates in digital environments reflects the collapse of industry standards as meaningful strategic referents. In classical strategy, shared standards, stable categories, and comparable competitors enabled successful patterns to stabilize into templates. In digitally mediated environments, these conditions no longer hold: firms do not operate under sufficiently shared conditions for common standards to emerge and persist, instead, face increasingly context-specific conditions that undermine comparability.

The core claim is, therefore, not merely that digital environments are more uncertain, but that they no longer provide a common external reference structure through which strategic action can be interpreted, compared, and transferred. As firms operate under firm-specific conditions even within the same system, templates lose their ontological foundation. Thus, the collapse of industry standards is not a temporary information problem but a structural consequence of how digital environments organize action. Three propositions follow from this analysis.

As digital environments become more strongly mediated by algorithms, infrastructures, and ecosystem interdependencies, firms increasingly operate under differentiated strategic conditions that are only partially comparable.
As the differentiation of strategic contexts increases, the formation of stable and transferable templates becomes systematically constrained because the conditions required for shared referents no longer hold.
Under these conditions, strategy shifts from replication and comparison toward context-specific enactment in which firms construct viable configurations within their own evolving environments.

This provides the bridge to the next step of the argument. If no stable external referents can guide action, then strategy must be generated from within the firm’s ongoing interaction with its environment. The next question is, therefore, not how firms choose among predefined models, but how they generate and stabilize action under such conditions. That question leads directly to experimentation.

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//

BibTeX EndNote Mendeley Zotero