Lilla Hortoványi

Strategy Without Templates

Adaptation in Digital Environments

10.3 Balancing Stabilization and Destabilization

Chapter 7 argued that organizations do not merely experiment. They also stabilize. Temporary solutions tend to become embedded through recursive use, repetition, and reinforcement. This stabilization is necessary because organizations need recurring patterns in order to coordinate, achieve efficiency, and preserve continuity. At the same time, stabilization produces path dependencies that can later restrict adaptation. The strategic task is, therefore, not to prevent stabilization – that would be neither realistic nor desirable – but to manage its timing, scope, and reversibility.

This tension becomes especially intense in digital environments. The pace of change is high, and many constraints are imposed from outside the firm by platforms, infrastructures, or ecosystem rules. A solution that is viable today may lose value tomorrow when a platform changes its architecture, ranking logic, or policy conditions. Firms, therefore, need to develop the ability both to reinforce what works and to unsettle what has become too rigid.

Selective reinforcement begins with a distinction between context-specific fixes and more broadly useful solutions. Not every successful experiment deserves to become a routine. Some experiments work only because they fit a temporary condition or solve a narrow local problem. When such outcomes are stabilized too quickly, the organization may lock itself into a path that later proves limiting. Other experiments reveal more general principles that travel across contexts or support wider coordination. These outcomes are stronger candidates for stabilization. Managers, therefore, need judgment about what exactly an experiment has shown. They must be able to separate local success from broader strategic usefulness.

Recent work on path coherence helps clarify why some pathways stabilize more easily than others. Kim et al. (2025) show that routines are more likely to persist when they display coherence across who acts, what is done, when it happens, where it happens, and why it is understood as appropriate. Stabilization, therefore, depends not only on repetition, but also on continuity of meaning and enactment. This suggests that managers can influence stabilization through the narratives they construct around experimental outcomes. When stabilization is desirable, they can strengthen coherence by linking outcomes to shared purposes and repeatable patterns. When flexibility is more important, they can interrupt coherence by reframing practices, rotating roles, or exposing the contingency of what appears settled.

Deliberate destabilization is the counterpoint. It involves intentionally disrupting functioning arrangements before they become severe constraints. This is difficult because organizations naturally hesitate to disturb what currently works. Yet Chapter 7 showed that stabilization often produces increasing returns, which make later change progressively harder. By the time a routine is clearly misaligned with its environment, the organization may already be too invested in it to change cheaply. Therefore, deliberate destabilization is anticipatory. It means identifying arrangements that are becoming overly sticky and reopening variation before lock-in becomes deep.

To do this well, firms need to recognize early warning signs of excessive stabilization. These signs include a decline in experimental activity, rising resistance to modification, the increasing use of workarounds to protect old systems, and a growing gap between organizational routines and environmental demands. When these signs appear, managers may need to intervene by redesigning routines, reallocating resources, introducing new interfaces, or reopening spaces for trial and variation.

The balance between stabilization and destabilization also depends on context. Liang et al. (2022) show, in their work on proportional ambidexterity, that the balance between exploration and exploitation should vary with total resources and contextual conditions. Organizations with abundant resources can maintain more variation and delay stabilization for longer. Organizations with scarce resources often need to stabilize quickly in order to secure operating efficiency. The same is true across environmental conditions. In highly volatile settings, excessive stabilization creates fragility. In more predictable settings, stronger stabilization may improve efficiency. There is no universal balance. The balance must be calibrated continuously.

This balance also operates across organizational levels. As Beane and Leonardi (2022) argue through the metaphor of pace layering, different organizational layers move at different speeds. Some layers must remain relatively stable in order to support continuity. Others must change rapidly in order to support responsiveness. Effective management, therefore, requires coordination across fast and slow layers. Fast layers need enough freedom to experiment. Slow layers need enough protection to preserve continuity. Yet the two layers must remain connected so that useful learning from fast-moving experiments can eventually reshape slower structures when necessary.

The core point is that stabilization is not the opposite of adaptation. It is part of adaptation. But without the counterweight of destabilization, it can harden into rigidity. Managing without templates, therefore, requires the capacity to stabilize selectively and destabilize deliberately.

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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