Lilla Hortoványi

Strategy Without Templates

Adaptation in Digital Environments


8.9 Emergent Coherence

Despite fragmentation, heterogeneity, and distributed coordination, digital organizations do not collapse into disorder. Instead, a form of coherence emerges over time. This emergent coherence is not designed in advance, but arises through the gradual alignment of practices, interfaces, and expectations. Components that function well together are retained and reinforced, while incompatible arrangements are modified or abandoned. Over time, this produces patterns of compatibility that enable continued operation without requiring full integration.
This process is inherently dynamic. Coherence is never fully achieved or permanently secured. It must be continuously reproduced as components evolve and new elements are introduced. As a result, organizations operate in a state of ongoing provisional alignment rather than stable equilibrium.
Emergent coherence, therefore, completes the logic of partial integration. It explains how systems remain viable despite lacking unified design, showing that functionality can be sustained through recursive stabilization rather than architectural completeness.
 

Strategy Without Templates

Tartalomjegyzék


Kiadó: Akadémiai Kiadó

Online megjelenés éve: 2026

ISBN: 978 963 664 204 4

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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