Sustainable development offers the promise of economic prosperity into the future by recognizing the importance of sustaining the regenerative capacity of natural resources. Yet, current organizational practices are damaging the natural environment at such a rapid rate that economic development cannot be sustained. In response, many organizations have set targets to reduce their environmental and social impacts to past levels, aiming to restore historical baselines. While learning from the past is essential, we illustrate that an exclusive focus on the past for future actions can actually hamper progress toward sustainability. Instead, we advocate for a future-focused approach that inspires innovative new practices, with specific recommendations for business scholarship.

Bansal, P. (Tima), Lee, J. Y., Mascena, A., Rüegger, S., & Miller, E. M. (2025). Sustainable development at a temporal crossroads: Learning from the past while focusing on the future. Journal of Business Research, 190, Article 115232. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2025.115232

Scholars have long sought to impact management practice. However, the current conceptualization of impact is grounded in dualisms, separating researchers from managers, means from ends, and thought from action. Such a dualistic understanding of impact hampers researchers’ and managers’ ability to achieve impact. Nowhere is this issue more acute than in the context of grand challenges, which require researchers and managers to work together closely. As a way forward, we propose a pragmatist perspective on impact, where impact is not seen as a one-time, unidirectional event, but rather as a relational and recursive process. By overcoming dualisms in traditional approaches to impact, pragmatist impacting can help advance progress on grand challenges and our current understanding of cocreation. In this paper, we illustrate pragmatist impacting and reflect on its opportunities and challenges through our experience at Innovation North, an innovation lab that brought together researchers and managers to cocreate a systems innovation process.

Wegener, F. E., Lee, J. Y., Mascena Barbosa, A., Sharma, G., & Bansal, P. (Tima). (2024). EXPRESS: From Impact to Impacting: A Pragmatist Perspective on Tackling Grand Challenges. Strategic Organization. https://doi.org/10.1177/14761270241238915

In spite of the explosion of interest in sustainability, management research is still nascent in addressing these pressing grand challenges confronting society, such as climate change, inequality, and biodiversity loss. In this article, we review the emergence and development of the field, which we argue can inform future research opportunities.
 
The early days of sustainability research were marked by two very different approaches to sustainability research. The first extended management and organizational studies incrementally. The second challenged the prevailing dominant management and organization paradigm and argued for a systems perspective. In more recent years, a third approach has emerged that sits in the liminal space between the dominant paradigm and a systems perspective.
 
In this paper, we argue that sustainability researchers need to re-engage with a systems perspective, which not only spans across levels of analysis, but also across disciplines. By doing so, we argue that sustainability researchers will be better equipped with new theories and methodologies that solve the increasingly urgent and large-scale problems facing society and assure a prosperous future for all.
 
Lee, J. Y., & Bansal, P. (Tima). Working paper under review. Identifying information removed to protect the double-blind review process. Please correspond with the first author to request a draft.

Traditional innovation approaches—breakthrough and design thinking—often ignore the complex ripple effects they produce in interconnected systems. In a world facing multifaceted challenges like climate change and sustainability, a systems-thinking approach offers a more resilient and holistic path forward. Systems thinking emphasizes understanding interdependencies, redefining problems iteratively, and engaging diverse stakeholders to co-create solutions.

This article outlines a four-step framework: (1) Define a desired future state. (2) Reframe problems so that they resonate across stakeholders. (3) Focus on flows and relationships over discrete products. And (4) implement small nudges to gradually shift the system. Examples from Maple Leaf Foods, Co-operators Insurance, and the CSA Group illustrate how this approach can realign business models for long-term sustainability.

While not a replacement for other innovation methods, systems thinking addresses their limitations in tackling “wicked problems.” It encourages companies to anticipate unintended consequences, build coalitions, and adaptively guide transformation in complex environments.

Bansal, T., & Birkinshaw, J. (2025, September–October). Why You Need Systems Thinking Now. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2025/09/why-you-need-systems-thinking-now

Corporations are currently confronting major, interlocking crises, including climate change, biodiversity loss, inequalities, and social isolation. When under threat, executives tend to focus inward and on the short term. This is particularly unfortunate because it is in such crises that executives need to see beyond the here and now in order to ride the storms. In this paper, we argue that corporate purpose helps organizations fight such myopia and offer four mechanisms through which this works: exposing new insights, seeing issues holistically, helping to sustain focus, and bringing unity and direction.
 
Lee, J. Y., Bansal, P. (Tima), & Mascena Barbosa, A. 2023. Seeing Beyond the Here and Now: How Corporate Purpose Combats Corporate Myopia. Strategy Science. Forthcoming. https://doi.org/10.1287/stsc.2023.0183

Society faces many wicked problems today such as climate change, income inequality, and biodiversity loss. Not only has business contributed to these problems but it also plays an important role in addressing them. Problems are “wicked” because they are embedded in complex systems that are continuously evolving. As no single actor can understand and solve a wicked problem, prior research has suggested that multiple actors, such as researchers and managers, come together to cocreate solutions. The cocreation process typically relies on the existing knowledge of the actors involved in the process. Yet, the dynamic nature of wicked problems requires actors to not just rely on cocreating on past knowledge but to cocreate tools that address future emerging or evolving problems.
 
In this paper, we seek to explain how researchers and managers can cocreate forward to address wicked problems. We illustrate the concept of cocreating forward through an innovation lab located at a Canadian business school. The lab brings together researchers, managers, and practitioners from various sectors to cocreate corporate innovation processes for addressing wicked problems. By cocreating forward, we show that research, learning, and practice need not be sequential but rather simultaneous activities.
 
Sharma, G., Greco, A., Grewatsch, S., & Bansal, P. (Tima). 2022. Cocreating Forward: How Researchers and Managers Can Address Problems Together. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 21(3): 350–368. https://doi.org/10.5465/amle.2021.0233

In 1843, Søren Kierkegaard said, “ It is perfectly true, as philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards.” Management researchers are often attracted to the business and society domain because of a desire to impact management practice to create a better world. However, they often do not have the impact that they hope, because researchers tend to rely on historical data, but managers seek insights that inform future actions. In this commentary, we describe our impact journey in three distinct moments in time. In the last one, both researchers and managers live forward.
 
Bansal, P. (Tima), & Sharma, G. 2022. Three Different Approaches to Impact: Translating, Cocreating, and Performing. Business & Society, 61(4): 827–832. https://doi.org/10.1177/00076503211015926

In this chapter, we describe a process in which managers co-create tools and knowledge with researchers to help navigate the turbulence and unpredictability of global crises. This co-creation process provides managers with a private space to reflect and the tools to act. We draw insights from our experiences with a lab within Innovation North, which is based on the principles of American Pragmatism.
 
Bansal, P. (Tima), & Sharma, G. 2021. The important role of management researchers in addressing global crises: Insights from Innovation North. In J. M. Bartunek (Ed.), Social Scientists Confronting Global Crises: 23–31. London, UK: Routledge.

Strategy scholars are increasingly attempting to tackle complex global social and environmental issues (i.e. wicked problems); yet, many strategy scholars approach these wicked problems in the same way they approach business problems—by building causal models that seek to optimize some form of organizational success. Strategy scholars seek to reduce complexity, focusing on the significant variables that explain the salient outcomes. This approach to wicked problems, ironically, divorces firms from the very social-ecological context that makes the problem “wicked.”
 
In this essay, we argue that strategy research into wicked problems can benefit from systems thinking, which deviates radically from the reductionist approach to analysis taken by many strategy scholars. We review some of the basic tenets of systems thinking and describe their differences from reductionist thinking. Furthermore, we ask strategy scholars to widen their theoretical lens by (1) investigating co-evolutionary dynamics rather than focusing primarily on static models, (2) advancing processual insights rather than favouring causal identification, and (3) recognizing tipping points and transformative change rather than assuming linear monotonic changes.
 
Grewatsch, S., Kennedy, S., & Bansal, P. 2021. Tackling wicked problems in strategic management with systems thinking. Strategic Organization. Forthcoming. https://doi.org/10.1177/14761270211038635

In this essay, we argue that by taking a systems lens, sustainability researchers can better understand the implications of COVID-19 on business and society and prevent future pandemics. A systems lens asks management researchers to move from a firm-level perspective to one that also considers the broader socioecological context. We argue that for business to prevent future pandemics and assure future prosperity, business must recognize the limits to growth, alternative temporalities that do not pit the short against the long term, the nestedness of local phenomena in global systems, and leverage points that can reduce entrenched systems of social inequalities.
 
Bansal, P. (Tima), Grewatsch, S., & Sharma, G. 2021. How COVID-19 Informs Business Sustainability Research: It’s Time for a Systems Perspective. Journal of Management Studies, 58(2): 602–606. https://doi.org/10.1111/joms.12669