ABSTRACT
Calls for ‘sustainability’ represents the most challenging ongoing issue that organizations face. Managers now have to interact with conditions that are considerably more complex and ill-defined than ever before. Sustainability adds new dimensions that makes the historical use of traditional business practices and ways of thinking merely reactive at best, obsolete at worst. Achieving success will require managers and their organizations to develop skills and methods that are more compatible with characteristics of the new sustainable business environment. This chapter characterizes the sustainability challenge as a ‘wicked problem’ that requires fundamentally different approaches of engagement. By adopting a complex adaptive systems perspective on strategizing, managers must focus more on interactions and higher system-level characteristics. This leads naturally to a learning-oriented, as opposed to a solution-oriented, approach to effective engagement around the challenge of sustainability.
