Lilla Hortoványi

Strategy Without Templates

Adaptation in Digital Environments

2 Rethinking the Environment: From Stable Contexts to Template-Free Systems

The concept of the environment is one of the most taken-for-granted yet most influential constructs in the history of strategic thought. From industrial organization to the contemporary literature on digital ecosystems, the environment has usually served as the background against which competition unfolds. It has been treated as the field within which firms position themselves, allocate resources, and respond to constraints and opportunities. Yet this apparently stable concept has become increasingly problematic. The central issue is not merely that the environment has become more turbulent. The deeper problem is that the ontology of the environment itself has changed.

Classical strategy theory typically treats the environment as an external context. It surrounds the firm, shapes its choices, and can be analyzed prior to action. In this view, the environment is not necessarily static, but it remains sufficiently stable, visible, and separable from the firm to support planning and positioning. This assumption was intellectually coherent in a world where industry boundaries were clearer, technologies changed more slowly, and regulatory frameworks produced more durable domains of competition. Under those conditions, the environment could plausibly be treated as something that firms encountered rather than something that was continuously reconstituted through interaction.

That conception is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain. Digitalization, platformization, and algorithmic mediation have transformed the environment from a relatively stable backdrop into a structured and evolving system in which firms are not merely embedded but implicated. The environment is no longer simply “out there.” It is increasingly constituted through interactions among firms, users, technological infrastructures, platform architectures, and governance mechanisms. What changes, therefore, is not only the pace of environmental change, but the very way in which the environment must be conceptualized.

The chapter develops this argument in a mechanism-based way. Its central claim is that traditional environmental theories become insufficient because they rely, implicitly or explicitly, on four assumptions that are progressively weakened in digitally mediated settings. They assume externality, in the sense that the environment exists outside the firm as an external domain. They assume transparency, in the sense that the environment can be sufficiently read and interpreted before action. They assume separability, in the sense that firm action and environmental structure can be analytically distinguished even when related. And they assume equilibrium, in the sense that the environment tends toward relatively stable states long enough for strategic analysis and adaptation to occur. These assumptions are not equally emphasized in every tradition, but together they define the stable-context logic that underpins much of strategy theory.

This chapter argues that digital environments do not simply intensify familiar forms of dynamism or complexity. They operate through mechanisms that systematically undermine externality, transparency, separability, and equilibrium. Therefore, the environment must be reconceptualized not as a fixed context, but as a structured ecology. In such ecologies, platforms function not as neutral intermediaries but as structuring mechanisms that govern interaction, visibility, and access. As a result, strategic action can no longer be understood primarily as positioning within a stable field. It must be understood as configuration under structural uncertainty.

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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