Abstract
Introduction
Beginnings
It has been 3 years since the leaders of the Academy of International Business Sustainability Shared Interest Group (AIB SIG) began work on this special issue.
The AIB SIG was founded in 2020 (AIB Sustainability Shared Interest Group, 2023), motivated by the urgent need to foster more responsible and sustainable international business practices through research, education, and advocacy. The Group took its first wobbly steps toward pursuing this agenda through the volatile and uncertain COVID-19 period, which exposed the deep interconnections of people, businesses, governments, and societies around the world. This served to further underscore the critical importance of the Group’s agenda.
This special issue was one of the first major initiatives of the AIB SIG. The aim was to contribute to the ongoing discourse on the need to embed environmental, social, and sustainability topics in management education. When this issue was conceptualized in 2023, the Journal of Management Education had already been a consistent champion for expanding management curricula, as evidenced by special issues on Teaching About The Natural Environment In Management Education (Egri and Rogers, 2003), Greening and Sustainability Across The Management Curriculum (Rusinko & Sama, 2009), Principles of Responsible Management Education–PRME (Forray & Leigh, 2012), and Sustainability in Management Education (Arevalo et al., 2020).
Through these and related work elsewhere, scholars had at that point made a strong case for embedding non-traditional topics into business and management education programs. This helped expand the understanding of how management responsibility reaches outside organizational boundaries to broader social, environmental, and sustainability concerns. Beyond conceptual understanding, however, educators highlighted the need to help managers acquire the skills and mindsets to productively engage with issues across a much expanded stakeholder ecosystem (Arevalo et al., 2020).
This special issue responds to this call: it rallies business and management educators around the world to urgently find ways to equip managers with the tools and competencies to lead the business transformations required for more sustainable global futures. The call was timely following the pandemic that exposed significant global vulnerabilities and that reinforced the critical role of business to be an important part of solutions to large-scale and highly complex problems.
Heightened Urgency
When this issue was conceived in 2023, countries were just beginning to emerge from the disruption of COVID-19, following its downgrade from an international public health emergency to an “established and ongoing health issue” (World Health Organization, 2023). The COVID crisis itself spanned 3 years of profound global disruption: deep economic contraction, mass mortality, and radical institutional transformations. It accelerated change in ways of living, thinking, doing, and learning. And when the World Health Organization (WHO) finally reclassified COVID to “just another virus” that year, the world was hopeful for a collective exhale. None was forthcoming.
Instead, what followed was another three (3) eventful years of disruption upon disruption, fundamentally reshaping the operating environment of people, businesses, and governments in the short and long term.
In 2023, the world marked the first calendar year when global average temperatures exceeded the 1.5° threshold set by the Paris Agreement (World Economic Forum, 2024). It was also the year when tensions in the Middle East escalated, adding to conflicts in Eastern Europe and Africa (International Rescue Committee, 2026; World Politics Review, 2025). Two years later, the 2025 Global Peace Index highlighted that there were more state-based armed conflicts than at any time since the Second World War (Institute for Economics and Peace, 2026). Key global risk indices have been at their highest levels in decades and are expected to continue increasing in the next 10 years (World Economic Forum, 2026).
The past 3 years have also seen the international trading system come under severe strain, driven largely by President Donald Trump’s “America First” protectionist tariff policies and the global community’s response to them. The system was built over 80 years and has underpinned global growth for the entirety of that period. However, this global economic system has itself been the site of another kind of war involving trade and tariffs between both political allies and adversaries. As a result, international economic agencies have revised global growth forecasts downward. These revisions reflect levels of tariff instability and policy unpredictability not seen in a century (International Monetary Fund, 2025; World Bank, 2025).
The wide availability and use of artificial intelligence (AI) have fueled a rapid rise in AI-generated misinformation and disinformation, now recognized as an immediate global risk (World Economic Forum, 2026). This misuse of information has contributed to one of the most divided and fractured periods since the Cold War (Elsner et al., 2025). At the same time, advances in agentic AI risk displacing workers and deepening inequalities if they are not managed appropriately in efforts to raise productivity (International Monetary Fund, 2026).
Moreover, AI’s disruptive effects are not confined to information integrity, labor markets, or organizational productivity. The rapid expansion of AI infrastructure is also placing growing pressure on energy systems, as data centers require substantial and continuous electricity to power computation, cooling, and storage (Leppert, 2025). This creates a further paradox for businesses and governments. Technologies promoted as solutions for efficiency, innovation, and sustainability may simultaneously intensify energy demand, raise costs for households and firms, and prolong reliance on fossil-fuel generation where renewable capacity and grid infrastructure have not kept pace (Alnafrah, 2025). The AI transition therefore illustrates the systemic nature of Grand Challenges. Technological innovation cannot be evaluated separately from its social, environmental, infrastructural, and geopolitical consequences.
All the abovementioned developments are not blips or incidental disturbances. They are Grand Challenges, and the 3 years since this special issue was conceptualized have only intensified the case for managers, businesses, organizations, and governments to be active and collaborative participants in addressing them.
This piece looks back on the conceptual foundations and motivations that led to this special issue. It first describes the unique characteristics of Grand Challenges and then explores the implications on the management skills and competencies required to tackle them. The significant contributions of management education thus far are presented, along with the advancements proposed by the papers in this issue. The piece concludes with a call for management education scholars to further intensify the even more urgent work required to support the development of managers with the capability and courage to lead in an unruly world.
Grand Challenges: A Reprise
Grand Challenges are large-scale, complex problems (George et al., 2016). As large-scale problems, they involve multiple stakeholders at individual, organizational, national, and global levels. They are complex, involving multiple dimensions whose interconnections are not always transparent. They are also dynamic with their nature and dimensions in constant flux (Funke, 2010). The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs), including climate change, poverty, inequality, and ecological sustainability, represent the most widely adopted framework for classifying Grand Challenges (George et al., 2016; Seelos et al., 2023).
As this special issue’s call for papers noted, business actions reverberate well beyond organizational boundaries. In many cases, businesses and private actors form part of the problem. For example, businesses are estimated to have directly or indirectly trapped 17.3 million people into forced labor in 2021 (International Labour Organization et al., 2022), roughly equivalent to twice the 2026 population of New York City. Additionally, research has underscored that international businesses seeking resources located in foreign countries systematically contribute to environmental crises (Yu et al., 2023).
In other cases, businesses can be part of the solution. For example, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Grameen Bank demonstrated the power of innovative and responsible business by pioneering its microcredit model in Bangladesh (Nobel Prize Outreach, n.d.). In 2026, the bank gave more than 10 million people access to financing, thus helping address severe poverty in that country (Grameen Bank, n.d.). Research has also demonstrated the significant potential for multinational enterprises (MNEs) to leverage their internal structures and incentives to decarbonize economies (Allen et al., 2025). Indeed, much work has been invested in this space for more than a decade (United Nations Principles for Responsible Management Education, n.d.).
While the urgency of addressing Grand Challenges is clear, and scholarship on how managers and businesses can contribute to solutions has increased, the field remains at an early stage of systematic engagement (Boroomand et al., 2026).
Implications for Management Skills and Management Education
Over the past 20 years, management education scholarship has successfully established the need to progressively broaden the range of topics to incorporate into management curricula. These topics—the environment, societal issues, sustainability, the SDGs—fall under the broad category of Grand Challenges (George et al., 2016).
It is encouraging to see rapid growth in scholarship on how businesses can help address Grand Challenges, particularly the converging pressures of geopolitical fragmentation, climate breakdown, technological disruption, and collapsing multilateralism.
It is likewise energizing to witness increasing interest among management education scholars to contribute to the urgent agenda to equip current and future managers with the critical skills to engage with the large-scale, complex, and dynamic challenges that continue to shape and reshape organizational and business contexts around the world.
Recent literature has reinforced the role of management educators in helping students critically interrogate deeply entrenched business norms (Beigh, 2025) and align values-driven careers with supporting responsible business practices (Brandhorst et al., 2024; De Vos et al., 2024). This requires systematically embedding ethics and sustainability in curricula, textbooks, cases, and other teaching materials (Jaganjac et al., 2024; Laasch, 2024a; Wubben, 2025).
The nature of Grand Challenges points to five key management skills and competencies that business schools and management educators are required to urgently develop.
Systems Thinking
There is a need to further intensify management education efforts to foster the systems thinking skills required by managers to gain insight into complex interdependencies in the business environment (Genin & Bu, 2026; Kano et al., 2025). This includes helping managers understand how business operations are connected to broader systems and issues that traditionally sit outside conventional business and management education.
Management education scholars have pointed out that systems thinking—involving situating business activity within the larger context of social and ecological systems—lies at the core of transforming both management practice and management education (André, 2025; Colombo, 2024; MacMillan, 2025). Important pedagogical innovations have recently emerged to foster systems thinking in business schools, including digital storytelling (Arevalo et al., 2025) and climate policy simulations (Chaudhry, 2024).
Cross-Contextual Literacy for Cross-sectoral Partnerships
Managers must also recognize the importance of strategic collaborations with actors across a range of contexts (Liu & Heugens, 2024). Managers therefore need the capabilities to understand how different stakeholder contexts intersect with business environments. These include non-government, social, and, indeed, indigenous contexts (Bruijn et al., 2024; Jamison et al., 2025; Minefee & Yue, 2025). Additionally, enhancing the ability of managers to develop systems thinking and cross-contextual literacy requires educators to continue integrating concepts such as ecology, planetary boundaries, and biodiversity into business and management curricula.
At the program level, management educators have reinforced the importance of helping students develop the ability to take multiple and interdisciplinary perspectives, given the transnational and intractable nature of Grand Challenges (Reina & McGinnis, 2026; Shantz et al., 2023). This includes understanding grassroots organizations, local communities, and a range of cultural, racial, historical, and geographic contexts (Ergene et al., 2024). Management educators have also called for the incorporation of non-Western ontological and epistemological approaches in business schools to help foster multiple understandings of the world (Fan, 2024; Hrenyk & Salmon, 2024).
Multi-Stakeholder Governance Capability
Addressing Grand Challenges requires coordinated and collective efforts among a range of stakeholders at different levels. Scholars have thus highlighted the governance challenge that managers must grapple with across stakeholders and over time (Boulongne et al., 2026; Couture et al., 2023; Marano et al., 2024). Managers must be capable of designing and maintaining collaborative governance structures that engage diverse stakeholders in productive dialog while avoiding paralysis or co-optation. This requires deliberate attention to finding new approaches to organizational design and partnership architectures (George et al., 2024), and new ways to govern global stakeholder networks (Chae et al., 2024; Zahra, 2025).
In line with this, management educators have advocated for raising students’ awareness of multiple logics and a wider range of social actors with competing interests and values (Lachapelle et al., 2025; Lähteenkorva, 2025). Students must be able to gain insights into the mechanisms of management decision-making across stakeholders and across levels, both individual and organizational (Tandon et al., 2025).
Sensemaking
Collective action on Grand Challenges depends critically on how problems are framed, communicated, and sustained over time. Managers who can construct compelling narratives—and sustain organizational commitments through discursive means when institutional enforcement is absent—are likely to be more effective at mobilizing the internal and external coalitions needed for sustainability transitions. The proliferation of AI-generated misinformation and disinformation puts pressure on managers to communicate with credibility and clarity more than ever (Drori et al., 2025; Lantz et al., 2025; Preuss et al., 2024).
Recent scholarship led management educators to find ways to help students reflect on how problems are posed, not just solved (Curtis, 2024; Santos et al., 2024) and acquire new vocabularies in order to aid in the sensemaking process (Edwards & Küpers, 2024).
Temporal and Adaptive Strategic Thinking
Scholars have underscored the tension between short-term competitive demands and long-term sustainability commitments as a critical managerial dilemma when addressing system-level change (Grewatsch & Ryan, 2026). Political and economic conflict, combined with technology-driven social and market upheavals have made the global business environment increasingly volatile and uncertain. As a result, managerial temporal ambidexterity has become a survival skill rather than merely a competitive advantage.
Indeed, time has featured as a key variable in recent management education scholarship. Scholarly discourse has explored tensions between radical approaches to overturning deeply entrenched management paradigms, thus encouraging extreme rapid change in management practices (Laasch, 2024b) versus more adaptive and evolutionary approaches (Hope & Molthan-Hill, 2026).
Recent progress in the business, management, and management education literatures underscores the increasing urgency for scholarly work to continue shaping business and management practice. As the world continues its unruly way forward, the need for leaders with the courage and capability to tackle Grand Challenges is a critical imperative.
Contributions of the Special Issue
This special issue offers tools, ideas, and food for thought for educators engaged in the mammoth task of preparing leaders to tackle Grand Challenges.
Three papers offer approaches to foster critical thinking and systems thinking among students. The paper on “Enhancing Management Education with AI: Chatbot-Assisted Case Studies” by Adib Bensalem highlights the potential of harnessing AI to help students critically engage with complex issues, while Jonathan Van Mumford, Sascha Fuerst, Peter Zettinig, Minna Storm, and Majid Aleem share a novel approach to help students develop systemic solutions in their paper on “International Innovation Camps for Tackling Grand Challenges.” Through experiential learning, design thinking, and cross-cultural collaboration, the camps develop students to critically analyze problem framings, navigate governance structures, engage in iterative problem-solving, and develop systemic, context-sensitive solutions to complex global challenges. In their paper on “Examining Grand Challenges Through a Systems Thinking Lens: An Innovative Multi-Day Case Study Approach to Exploring Sustainability,” Shankar Sankaran, Peggy Hedges, Amy L. Kenworthy, Tony Wall, Suzette Dyer, David R. Jones, and Fiona Hurd share more than a decade of experience with a course that employs a multi-day case study. The 14-year-old course uses systems thinking to build students’ capacity to address complex socio-ecological challenges. Key skills developed include understanding interconnectedness, conceptual modeling for intervention design, and dialogic participatory action planning, applied to poverty reduction in informal settlements.
Daniel Tisch, Hanoku Bathula, Nina Brosius, Andrew Patterson, and Edvard Glücksman reflect on how a program can be designed to develop students’ interdisciplinary thinking, ability to navigate organizational complexity, and multicultural collaboration skills in their paper on “Tackling the United Nations SDGs Through the Future17 Program: A Reflective Case Study Using Autoethnographic Techniques.” They offer universities a structured framework and practical guidance for implementing this Grand Challenges-focused educational approach.
Fiona Hurd and Suzette Dyer focus on ways to scaffold students’ sensemaking in “Management Students Making Sense: Scaffolding Grand Challenges Through Threshold Concepts and Concept Maps.” They explore how iterative concept mapping develops students’ abilities to recall and apply foundational knowledge to Grand Challenges, analyze interconnections between business, government, and social actors within wicked problems, and connect personal values to systemic issues. The approach scaffolds progressive layers of sensemaking that build capacity for constructing solutions to complex global challenges.
Barbara Czarnecka, Katherine Baxter, and Grace O’Rourke underscore how much more needs to be done by management education institutions to genuinely incorporate Grand Challenges into curricula. Their study—“Educating Responsible Business Leaders: Organizational Hypocrisy in British Universities’ Commitment to Environmental Sustainability Education”—finds that environmental sustainability topics are embedded inconsistently and often superficially in university programs, regardless of institutions’ formal sustainability commitments. They reveal a gap between universities’ stated values and the environmental sustainability skills with which they actually equip students.
Finally, in their piece on “Preparing Faculty to Teach Grand Challenges: The Intersection of Pedagogical Experience and Reflexivity, a Public Narrative Theory Approach,” Melissa J. Sayer, David Horan, and Lauren J. Lahie encourage management educators to turn the analytical lenses of the Grand Challenges discourse onto themselves. Focusing on teachers rather than students, their article uses public narrative theory and shared reflexivity to help educators navigate individual, institutional, and subject-related challenges of teaching Grand Challenges. It proposes transdisciplinary communities of practice and collective sensemaking as essential tools for preparing faculty to meaningfully embed sustainability in business education.
Forging Ahead
Overall, the contributions in this special issue suggest that preparing leaders for Grand Challenges cannot rely on traditional pedagogies, isolated modules, individual champions, or symbolic references to sustainability in program documentation. Management educators face daunting imperatives to forge ahead.
Experiential and Humanistic Approaches in Management Education
There continues to be significant scope to explore pedagogical innovations to foster the cross-disciplinary thinking, complexity navigation, and multi-stakeholder leadership required to tackle Grand Challenges. Traditional case methods may develop analytical skills but miss opportunities to cultivate moral reasoning, ethical courage, and the collaborative leadership needed for transformative change (Kiss et al., 2025). More work in experiential learning innovations is required in order to enhance student engagement and encourage them to move beyond tactical decision-making.
Critically, most pedagogical innovations remain disconnected from explicit engagement with human dimensions embedded in power structures and inequalities (Dorion & Picard, 2025). There are thus important opportunities to complement “hard skills” related to systems thinking with humanistic approaches such as storytelling, reflective practice, and sensemaking.
Finally, there is much to understand regarding the long-term effectiveness of management pedagogies as underscored by the papers in this issue.
Curriculum Redesign: From Functional Silos to System Embeddedness
Equipping leaders with necessary skills and competencies requires a deeper reorientation of management education: from teaching students to optimize within existing systems, toward helping them question, redesign, and act across those systems. This means rethinking management curricula that have been traditionally organized according to functional business silos (e.g., accounting, marketing, finance, and operations). Management curricula must be reconfigured to help students recognize connections across functions within organizations and interconnections and interdependencies among stakeholders across systems.
This also means rethinking what learning outcomes business schools reward and assess in management education programs. Analytical rigor and technical proficiency certainly remain important. However, so do reflexivity, ethical judgment, collaborative capacity, contextual sensitivity, and the courage to engage with problems for which no single discipline, organization, or generation can claim ownership. Business schools need evidence-based frameworks for embedding sustainability competencies across all core disciplines while simultaneously developing validated assessment instruments that measure deep learning, systems thinking, and sustained behavioral change.
While there may be existing frameworks to help universities, there are continuing gaps in curriculum transformation that need to be urgently addressed. Grand Challenges education is not merely about adding new content to the curriculum; it is about changing the purposes, practices, and accountabilities of management education itself.
Institutional Support for Management Educators
Finally, there is much to be done in supporting management educators themselves for the task of equipping leaders to tackle Grand Challenges. The management educators at the frontlines in the classroom are the primary agents of change, and themselves need support in developing systems thinking, Grand Challenge framing, and facilitating transformative learning around large-scale, complex issues. Without addressing the need to develop teachers as advocates, other reforms remain superficial and short-lived.
This requires significant institutional support for academic development. There is a fundamental need to equip management educators with the tools and frameworks for pedagogical innovation in the classroom. This includes investigations of how academic communities of practice can sustain faculty engagement with sustainability teaching, along with research on how educators navigate the tensions between disciplinary expertise and the cross-disciplinary literacy required to embed sustainability in courses and programs.
In addition to developmental support, there is an urgent need to revisit academic incentive systems and understand how institutional pressures shape faculty willingness to adopt new approaches to management education. This includes incentives to engage in pedagogical innovation, curriculum transformation, and developing interdisciplinary expertise.
This special issue, led by the Academy of International Business Sustainability SIG and in close collaboration with the Journal of Management Education and the Management and Organizational Behavior Teaching Society, offers a timely reminder that the task of management educators to prepare leaders for an unruly world has become even more urgent. The global community of educators has made significant strides in advancing education and pedagogy; however, much more remains and needs to be done.
Indeed, management education itself is a Grand Challenge. It requires systems thinking, cross-contextual problem-solving, multi-stakeholder governance, collective adaptive innovation, and long-term stamina to stay the course while making sense of a messy, unpredictable world.
