The 21st century presents a range of complex and interdependent challenges, including climate change, resource depletion, economic inequality, and technological disruptions. These so-called wicked problems demand a paradigm shift in our approach to problem-solving. Addressing such challenges requires multi-stakeholder partnerships and holistic, systems-level approaches that transcend traditional, siloed methodologies. Systems thinking, a powerful tool for understanding complexity and interconnections, offers a pathway to sustainable solutions.
Although systems theory became foundational in fields such as environmental sciences during the 20th century, its adoption in strategic management research has been more limited. This reluctance may be tied to the enduring influence of reductionist approaches rooted in early scientific management and innovation models. A systems perspective is critical as it views organizations as complex adaptive systems or 'functioning wholes', which contrasts with problem-solving focusing on isolated components. This special collection aims to bring systems thinking methodologies to the forefront and inspire a deeper engagement with systems-based frameworks and tools, advancing both theoretical and practical understanding of their application in business and management contexts, as well as their transformative potential in addressing complex, interconnected challenges.
By shifting away from traditional reductionist approaches, we seek to highlight how systems thinking can uncover hidden dynamics, identify leverage points, and foster innovative solutions at the intersection of sustainability and digitalization. The new technologies of the Industry 4.0 revolution, including data-driven insights, automation and increased transparency, are changing the way businesses operate. However, it is important to better understand the impact of these disruptive innovations as a result of rapidly progressing digital technologies, as they often convey a dark side of digital change in the social and environmental context. This duality highlights the importance of applying systems thinking to ensure that digital transformation aligns with sustainability goals. Within the sustainability domain, the circular economy introduces a new economic system and logic that also fundamentally disrupts business-as-usual. This requires a shift from individual-level innovation to collective solutions, thus relying on an ecosystem and systemic approaches to achieve a whole-of-lifecycle perspective and integrate supply chains to create closed-loop systems. However, existing tools and frameworks often fail to accommodate the complexity of such an interconnected approach, limiting their effectiveness in addressing the challenges of circularity and disruptive digital solutions.
Recent literature increasingly calls for holistic, systems-level assessments and methodologies to address complex sustainability challenges. While 'system change' and 'systems thinking' often appear in the political, industry and academic discourse, these calls have yet to be fully realized. Nonetheless, the superficial adoption of systems thinking, which neglects the tools and methods to uncover underlying feedback mechanisms and behaviour over time, risks creating a façade of systemic awareness while inadvertently exacerbating issues and rebound effects, ultimately worsening the planetary crisis. This online collection seeks to bridge this gap by highlighting innovative research and practices and by advancing our understanding of interconnected systems and the leverage points within them, we can develop more effective business strategies for achieving resilience and sustainable development.
In this call for papers, we emphasize the importance of 'real' systemic change in the contexts of sustainability, digitalization, and resilience. By aspiring to a real system change, we recognize that defining what constitutes a 'real' systemic shift remains a challenging, often contested but also underdeveloped issue, with scholars often using terms such as 'systemic change', 'system change' or 'transformative change', or using 'systems thinking' without the adequate tools and methodologies applied. There is also a variety among the types of systems across disciplines, definitions used and their scale, which makes this even more difficult to clarify. The literature points to examples, such as large-scale system changes that involve both the breadth of engaging large numbers of people, institutions, and geographies, as well as the depth of transforming the complex power structures and relationships within these systems. Cross-sector partnerships navigating wicked problems are often marked by knowledge uncertainty, value conflicts, and complexity, which require adaptable governance processes to continuously reassess the problem over time. Addressing a complex issue often requires assessing the levers and solutions by examining cross-boundary impacts across different systems and sectors. Expanding the boundary can offer additional insights into intervention points, revealing hidden mechanisms or suggesting that the most effective leverage may lie on someone else's patch. Thus, there is a need for new studies and frameworks that capture the complex interactions between actors, partnerships, and societal issues, across different levels, metrics and scales. Together, these perspectives illustrate that 'real' systemic change is not a static, singular transformation, but an evolving process shaped by diverse and often conflicting stakeholder interests, involving cross-boundary and cross-sector connections.
We invite contributions that explore and contribute to the better understanding of 'real' systemic change, through investigating the synergy between systems thinking, sustainability, and digitalisation. Accordingly, this online collection aims to address the urgent need for a paradigm shift in how we conceptualise and tackle grand challenges, building upon cross-sector partnerships and value co-creation, leveraging frameworks like the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), circular economy principles, and the transformative potential of Industry 4.0 and 5.0 technologies. We invite contributors to discover and use a wide range of tools within systems thinking, including but not limited to causal loop diagrams, system archetypes, system maps, system dynamics models, group model building, and participatory methods.