Lilla Hortoványi

Strategy Without Templates

Adaptation in Digital Environments

7.1 Satisficing as Structural Selection: From Optimality to Viability

The first step in stabilization is selection, but not in the classical sense of choosing the best available option. In template-free environments, firms rarely possess the information, comparability, or time required to identify optimal solutions. What matters first is whether a response is viable enough to allow continued operation. Stabilization, therefore, begins with sufficiency, not with optimality.

This logic aligns with Simon’s (1955) concept of bounded rationality, where decision makers satisfice rather than optimize. Here, however, satisficing has a structural role. A response that proves workable in the moment is more likely to be repeated, and repeated use is the first condition for a temporary adjustment to persist. Viability acts as the first structural filter. The organization does not retain what is best, but what works well enough to keep activity moving.

While Herbert Simon originally developed satisficing to explain bounded rationality in discrete individual choices, the logic can be extended to collective action and structural emergence. Organizations face even greater search costs when evaluating structural alternatives, good-enough arrangements enable coordination without requiring consensus on optimality, and structural persistence often begins when search is terminated once a minimally viable threshold has been reached. However, unlike individual satisficing, structural satisficing involves multiple actors with potentially different thresholds and interests, making the process more complex and often politically contested.

This extension is consistent with empirical evidence. Research on regulatory decision making in automated trading demonstrates how bounded rationality leads to satisficing responses that become embedded in organizational structures (Currie et al., 2022). The study identifies four constraints – regulatory policy drift, differing capability, technological obfuscation, and stakeholder behavior – that collectively shape decision choices and result in suboptimal but stable outcomes.

Nevertheless, recent research on regulatory decision making in automated trading demonstrates how bounded rationality leads to satisficing responses that become embedded in organizational structures (Currie et al., 2022). The study identifies four constraints, namely regulatory policy drift, differing capability, technological obfuscation, and stakeholder behavior, that collectively shape decision choices and result in suboptimal but stable outcomes. This process model reveals how human limitations in processing complex information lead to the adoption of good enough solutions that subsequently constrain future choices.

The shift from optimality to viability has important implications for organizational structure. It means that what persists is often selected under pressure, uncertainty, and constrained visibility. Temporary responses survive because they solve enough of the immediate problem to allow ongoing operation. Once they do so, they become candidates for reuse. Stabilization, therefore, begins before the organization has fully evaluated alternatives.

It starts when action continues because of a response that proves sufficiently viable. Repetition begins when a satisficing response proves workable in practice, not because it is optimal, but because it reduces search costs and cognitive load in subsequent similar situations, thereby becoming the path of least resistance for actors facing recurring problems.

This mechanism matters because it marks the first transition from temporary adjustment to possible persistence. A response does not become durable simply because it exists. It becomes durable because it is viable enough to be used again. In this sense, satisficing is not only a decision rule. It is the first condition under which adaptation begins to leave a structural trace.

This point also sharpens the link to the previous chapters without repeating them. Earlier chapters showed why firms cannot reliably compare options through templates or stable external standards. Chapter 6 then showed why they must learn through action. The present mechanism adds the next step: once action must proceed without full prior knowledge, what survives is often the first workable configuration that can be made to function. Satisficing is, therefore, not only a cognitive shortcut. It is the first structural condition under which temporary responses begin to persist.

The claim is not that firms never optimize, nor that all structures are inferior substitutes for ideal designs. The point is narrower and more defensible. Under conditions of uncertainty, opacity, and infrastructural constraint, viability often precedes optimization as the basis of persistence. Structures frequently emerge because they solve enough of the current problem to keep the organization operating, and because later activity begins to build on them before alternatives can be fully assessed.

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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