Lilla Hortoványi

Strategy Without Templates

Adaptation in Digital Environments

6 Experimentation as Default Mode: Strategy Without Foresight

If Chapter 4 showed why strategy can no longer rely on transferable templates, and Chapter 5 explained why firms no longer operate under sufficiently shared conditions for stable external referents to emerge, then the strategic problem must be reformulated more precisely. The core issue is not choice among predefined alternatives, but the generation of actionable knowledge under conditions where the environment is structured yet differentiated, only partially visible, and too unstable to validate action in advance. Under such conditions, foresight and comparison do not disappear entirely, but neither can provide a sufficient basis for strategic action. Therefore, strategy must be formed through engagement with the environment rather than through prior specification alone.

This is the starting point of Chapter 6. When transferable templates weaken and shared referential contexts no longer stabilize, experimentation becomes not a discretionary managerial preference but a structurally induced mode of operation. It becomes the primary means through which firms generate situated knowledge, test emerging possibilities, and provisionally stabilize workable configurations under structural uncertainty. This shifts the locus of strategy from ex ante design to iterative construction through action. This argument extends the configurational logic developed in the preceding chapters. Adaptation is not a sequence of isolated decisions. It is a recursive process through which configurations are formed, tested, adjusted, and selectively stabilized under constraint.

The chapter develops this argument through a mechanism-based framework. Its purpose is not simply to restate that experimentation matters, but to explain how strategy formation proceeds when knowledge cannot reliably precede action. Rather than organizing the argument as a broad thematic discussion, the chapter traces the causal processes through which firms act, learn, and stabilize under mediated and non-comparable conditions. Six mechanisms structure this process: epistemic displacement, generative enactment, recursive path-dependent feedback, architecture-mediated search, inferential navigation, and pattern sedimentation. Together, these mechanisms specify a coherent causal chain linking action, feedback, interpretation, and stabilization into a path-dependent process of strategy formation.

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