Lilla Hortoványi

Strategy Without Templates

Adaptation in Digital Environments

8.8 Meta-Organizational Coordination

As internal coherence weakens, coordination increasingly extends beyond the boundaries of the firm. Digital organizations operate within ecosystems composed of platforms, partners, service providers, and users. Therefore, coordination is achieved not only internally, but also through meta-organizational arrangements.

Recent research demonstrates this pattern empirically. Kretschmer et al. (2020) show that platform ecosystems function as meta-organizations in which coordination is achieved through shared governance structures rather than hierarchical control. Similarly, Leong et al. (2024) document how digital platform organizations coordinate activities through distributed mechanisms that span organizational boundaries, reinforcing the role of meta-organizational coordination in digitally mediated environments.

These arrangements rely on shared standards, protocols, and governance mechanisms that enable interaction among independent actors. Platforms play a central role by defining rules of participation, interface specifications, and mechanisms of value exchange.

Meta-organizational coordination allows firms to access capabilities that they do not possess internally. However, it also distributes control across multiple actors, making coordination partial, negotiated, and contingent.

This form of coordination reinforces partial integration by shifting the locus of coherence outward. Rather than integrating all components within a single organization, firms rely on external alignment mechanisms that operate across organizational boundaries.

The result is a system in which functionality is achieved through inter-organizational compatibility rather than intra-organizational unity. Organizations become nodes within larger assemblages, connected through shared infrastructures and governance structures.

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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