Lilla Hortoványi

Strategy Without Templates

Adaptation in Digital Environments

8.7 Controlled Fragmentation

While fragmentation is often treated as a deficiency, in digital environments it can become a deliberately maintained condition. Organizations may choose not to integrate certain components fully in order to preserve flexibility, isolate risks, or enable experimentation.

Controlled fragmentation involves maintaining separations between subsystems, allowing them to evolve independently. This reduces the need for system-wide coordination and prevents local changes from propagating across the entire organization. As a result, firms can experiment with new tools, processes, or business models without destabilizing existing operations.

This mechanism introduces a strategic trade-off. Greater fragmentation increases adaptability but reduces coherence. However, under conditions where environments are volatile and outcomes uncertain, the ability to adjust locally may be more valuable than achieving global consistency.

Controlled fragmentation also supports parallelism, enabling multiple solutions to coexist. Rather than converging on a single integrated system, organizations maintain alternative arrangements that can be activated, modified, or abandoned as conditions change.

Therefore, partial integration is not simply the result of failed integration. It can reflect a strategic choice to preserve structural diversity and optionality, even at the cost of coherence.

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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