Lilla Hortoványi

Strategy Without Templates

Adaptation in Digital Environments

8.6 Digital Bricolage

Digital bricolage provides a mechanism through which organizations actively construct partial integration under constraint. Rather than designing systems from first principles, firms recombine available digital resources to create workable solutions. This involves using tools in ways not originally intended, combining disparate systems, and adapting existing components to new purposes.

Bricolage is driven by necessity rather than preference. Firms operate under conditions where time, expertise, and financial resources are limited, making comprehensive system integration infeasible. Instead, they pursue pragmatic recombination, assembling solutions that function sufficiently well without requiring architectural coherence.

This process produces systems characterized by improvised connections, overlapping functionalities, and uneven standardization. While such arrangements may appear suboptimal from a classical integration perspective, they enable rapid adaptation and continuous operation.

Importantly, bricolage is not purely ad hoc. Over time, repeated use stabilizes certain combinations, transforming them into locally reliable configurations. These stabilized arrangements become part of the organization’s evolving structure, even if they were not originally intended as permanent solutions.

Digital bricolage, therefore, reinforces partial integration by enabling organizations to function without resolving underlying inconsistencies. It transforms constraint into a generative condition, producing systems that are viable precisely because they do not depend on full integration.

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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