The Duct Tape Guide To Digital Strategy

The value of technology is found in the new capabilities it enables for a business, not simply in owning it. As with duct tape, a single technology may elicit many possible strategic moves.

- Gerald C. Kane, Jonathan R. Copulsky, Anh Nguyen Phillips And Garth Andrus

Digital strategy is about adapting the organization to a changing environment in a way that leads to a sustainable competitive advantage. The theory of affordances may help organizations tackle the digital strategy development process proactively.

The term affordances was created by psychologist James J. Gibson to describe the possible ways that humans or other animals can interact with their environment. It treats the animal and its environment not as fundamentally separate from one another but as inextricably entangled. The environment determines the actions available to the animal while the animal can alter the environment in ways that change its capabilities for acting. For example, an affordance of the electric lightbulb is the ability for people to see or read at night, which, in turn, allows employees to work in nondaylight hours.

In his 1979 book, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, Gibson offers the following definition of affordances:

The affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill. The verb to afford is found in the dictionary, the noun affordance is not. I have made it up. I mean by it something that refers to both the environment and the animal in a way that no existing term does. It implies the complementarity of the animal and the environment.

This concept of affordances was subsequently picked up by the fields of computer science and information systems to describe how people interact with technology. An affordance perspective suggests that people and information technology are fundamentally intertwined with one another. Technology changes the possible actions of people and organizations, while the ways in which people and organizations use technology change the effects of the technology in practice.