Lilla Hortoványi

Strategy Without Templates

Adaptation in Digital Environments

6.8 Limits and Tensions of Experimental Strategy

Experimentation as a dominant mode of adaptation does not resolve uncertainty. It reorganizes it. Rather than reducing ambiguity, it shifts where and how uncertainty is experienced within the organization. For that reason, the chapter must also address the tensions that experimental strategy generates. Two are particularly important.

First, path dependence can progressively constrain later adaptation. As configurations stabilize, they may reduce flexibility and increase dependence on prior selections, producing forms of lock-in even when those selections were originally local and provisional (Pentland et al., 2022). What initially expands the space of possible action can, over time, narrow it.

Second, firms must continually balance experimentation with operational stability. Too much experimentation can fragment coordination and weaken execution, while too much stabilization can reduce responsiveness and narrow future options. The tension between exploration and exploitation, therefore, remains, but it now unfolds under platform mediation and partial visibility rather than within a stable learning environment (Soh et al., 2022). This balance cannot be predefined but must be continuously managed in practice.

Additional challenges follow from the same logic. Experimental outcomes are often difficult to interpret cleanly. Learning may remain local and hard to transfer across the organization. Platform governance can create asymmetries in who gets to test, what becomes visible, and which responses are selectively reinforced (Rahman et al., 2023; Keegan, A., & Meijerink, J ., 2025). These difficulties do not negate experimentation. They show that experimentation itself requires organizational discipline, interpretive capacity, and mechanisms for managing its accumulated consequences. Experimental strategy is, therefore, demanding rather than inherently advantageous.

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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