Adaptive Sustainability for Business Management in an Age of Disruption and Transformation

Abstract

Businesses today operate in a dynamically changing, complex and uncertain global environment. In order to remain viable into the future, businesses need to continually innovate and improve performance across all areas. But keeping up with rapidly changing economic, social, political and environmental conditions is difficult, while at the same time trying to maximise profitability, and deliver ongoing value to all stakeholders. Adaptive Sustainability has already been used in a range of Natural Resource Management and equivalent settings, but is new as an approach across business management more broadly. The Adaptive Sustainability approach has the capacity to take businesses beyond existing strategies to deal with large scale change, such as compliance, lean, and continuous improvement, to capitalise on change and lead to new levels of prosperity. Adaptive Sustainability for Business Management is based on a new type of learning and action framework that addresses practical governance and operational issues, and combines these with principles of systems thinking to create an innovative approach, leading to responsive and responsible business management.