Abstract
Climate change and social unrest are signs that the planet, and everyone on it, is at risk. Business schools have a responsibility to build and share knowledge to mitigate this crisis. One important step is to help students learn how to act in a sustainable manner—to ensure the prosperity of not just today’s generations, but also tomorrow’s, within planetary boundaries/limits. While some students are eager to learn about how to achieve sustainability, others push back against the idea of straying from a strict profit motive in business. In an interview with Dr. Pratima (Tima) Bansal, a highly accomplished sustainability scholar, she offers her own experiences on the challenges she has faced in the classroom and her approaches to increase teaching effectiveness. She covers several topics, including the often-divisive nature of sustainability; the power of encouraging systems thinking, a process ontology, and a focus on a desirable future; and advice for new faculty to approach work as art. Overall, the insights of Dr. Bansal may help other instructors to effectively prepare students to contribute to a more prosperous and sustainable future.
Keywords
Today’s newsfeeds seem to be filled with stories that suggest the world is struggling like never before. Climate change, social unrest, grand inequities, and widespread environmental degradation are signs that we humans are sabotaging ourselves. Earth has become an unsafe environment for humanity and other forms of life (Richardson et al., 2023).
With a core mission to build and share knowledge, many would argue that business schools hold a critical responsibility to help navigate this global crisis (McLaren, 2020; Panwar et al., 2023) but are currently failing (Hoffman, 2023; Laasch, 2024; Palma et al., 2023). This may be because business schools have historically reinforced an unsustainable path where shareholders have been prioritized more than stakeholders (Aguado & Elizaguirre, 2020) and a heavy weight is placed on competition, profit, and short-termism (Colombo, 2023). Traditionally, business schools have favored a disparate view that treats business, society, and the environment as distinct realms that are separate from each other (Marcus et al., 2010). With this siloed approach, students have been taught that business decisions should be made solely based on what is best for the organization, rather than with a consideration for what serves not only the business, but also society and the environment. Although there has been significant movement to a more comprehensive perspective (e.g., balanced scorecards—Kaplan & Norton, 2007), there is still much work to be done
Teaching future leaders how to think in a sustainable manner should be a priority (Laasch, 2024) and is consistent with the United Nations strategy to begin to address our current crises. Sustainable Development Goal 4.7 (United Nations, 2015) states that we should strive to ensure that by 2030 all learners have the knowledge and skills to promote sustainable development.
Business schools, especially, are well poised to help as they are often in a position to influence how organizational leaders deal with the challenges that accompany climate change, the process of adapting business models and mental models (Galdón et al., 2022), and the increasingly stringent regulatory obligations (Goncalves, 2019). While some momentum was gained in taking a broader view after the 2008 financial crisis, which stoked a growing level of criticism against capitalism, some have suggested that business schools have not done nearly enough to help with the urgent issues we are facing (Galdón et al., 2022; Laasch, 2024). Although most institutions have added sustainability content to their curriculum, there is insufficient evidence that business schools have been fully successful in embedding sustainability principles into how graduates think and approach decision-making (Cortese et al., 2010). There are growing calls for business schools to “step up” and get the next generation ready for the upcoming carbon transition (Colombo et al., 2024; Delmas & Sparks, 2024) and other grand challenges (Shantz et al., 2023). A more sustainable approach may be the only way to guarantee our survival as a species.
However, teaching future leaders about sustainability is not always straightforward or easy (Aragon-Correa et al., 2017). Simply adding more sustainability content to existing curriculum is not sufficient to embed a sustainability mindset and change behavior. Experience has shown that there can be pushback against non-traditional approaches that de-prioritize the disparate/profits-at-all-cost view. When presented with sustainability concepts, students can choose to ignore the ideas that challenge their core beliefs. Thus, it seems likely that a core obligation for business schools is not only to teach sustainability concepts, but to also prioritize finding effective methodologies that help to build a sustainability mindset in students (and other stakeholders). In other words, it is not enough to offer the ideas, it is important to find ways to help students see the value of a sustainable approach to business.
To that end, I recently invited a highly respected sustainability scholar to share her thoughts on how to approach the teaching of sustainability. My objective was to learn from her extensive experience and ultimately to generate more conversations around how to tackle this important responsibility facing business schools.
Dr. Pratima (Tima) Bansal is a Professor of Sustainability and Strategy at the Ivey Business School at Western University in Ontario, Canada. After earning a doctorate from the University of Oxford, she has gone on to receive widespread recognition for her contributions to research. She has a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair, is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and is a Fellow of the Academy of Management. She has published in many top research journals, including the Academy of Management Journal (AMJ), the Academy of Management Review, Organization Science, and the Strategic Management Journal, and has served on the editorial board for 11 different journals (including Deputy Editor of AMJ). She has written books on sustainability and writes a regular column on the topic for Forbes.com. She is also an outspoken advocate for qualitative research. Her overall influence is such that she has received honorary doctorates from the University of Hamburg, Université de Montreal, and the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. She has also been affiliated with Monash University and the University of Cambridge.
With a keen interest in connecting with industry for mutual effect, Dr. Bansal leads Innovation North, a research-practice initiative that has involved over 30 organizations and a diverse group of academics eager to innovatively tackle complex business challenges. Systems thinking is at the core of activities used to strengthen each business and work toward a more resilient, sustainable society. In 2003, she founded the Network for Business Sustainability which was designed to act as a bridge between research and practice, helping to put learnings from sustainability research into the hands of active managers. Over 8,000 researchers and managers are currently connected, and there are over 100,000 visitors to the network’s website each year.
At this time, Dr. Bansal is serving as the Chair of the Principles for Responsible Management Education’s (PRME) advisory board of directors—an initiative of the United Nations. With over 800 signatories across 90 countries, the group is focused on providing thought leadership on how business schools can advance responsible leadership and sustainable development. The goal is to transform management education to improve our ability to develop responsible decision-makers for a more sustainable future.
Dr. Bansal agreed to be interviewed by me about her professional experiences and her approach to teaching the topic of sustainability. Her thoughts may be useful to instructors of sustainability and other courses, along with practitioners who are interested in embedding a sustainability mindset into their organizations.
Interview
You have been teaching sustainability for a long time. What has that been like? What are some of the key challenges of teaching students about sustainability?
You’re making me think of my early days. In 2001, I was teaching Strategy at the Ivey School of Business (I’m still here) and I proposed a sustainability course—our first one—to a curriculum committee that was revamping our MBA program. The committee was supportive, so I spent a year co-developing the course with three MBA students. It was great fun, as sustainability wasn’t really a topic taught in business schools at that time, and we could develop innovative pedagogy that brought these sustainability issues to life.
You can imagine my surprise, when I received so much push back from MBA students as we delivered the programming. For example, one piece included a community service-learning component. Students would spend a day volunteering in the local community and debrief their experiences at the end of the day. It did not go over well. A group of very vocal students said they were being voluntold and they were spending too much money for a business school education to have to do community work. I admit that I just hadn’t anticipated this response.
I also experienced another setback. Even though I had prepared all the pedagogy and the slides and was researching in this space, my teaching evaluations were lower than what I had expected. In fact, to this day my teaching evaluations are still higher for teaching strategy than sustainability.
What do you think might be the problem?
I have a couple of thoughts. First, in a business school, profits were and still are assumed to be the desired outcome. I was asking students to consider a different desirable outcome—namely, a better world. This wasn’t what students had signed onto. Many students were simply looking to advance their career. When students study biology, sociology, or English, they often do it for the love of the material. They are not thinking about their jobs. Students in business schools are different.
So, when I spoke about sustainability, they thought I was imposing a perspective that they didn’t share. I started to see that they thought sustainability was normative. I felt organizational profits were normative. But profit-making and taking were so normalized that it was just taken as fact. Keep in mind, I was teaching in the early 2000s in the core program, at a time that many people did not believe climate change was real. In their mind, I was teaching beliefs, not facts.
The second reason is more provocative, but I think it’s important to verbalize. Most business school faculty were primarily White men. I think I was the only non-White woman on faculty at that time. I was likely being judged more harshly for teaching cutting edge, seemingly peripheral and normative material than my more traditional looking colleagues. It would be unfair to put too much of the blame on my demographics, as I’m sure that how I taught the material also didn’t help my cause. I took the stuff I taught very seriously, which perhaps did not help to put students at ease.
Well, you can’t change who you are, so how do you think someone like you could have been teaching a hot-button, seemingly moral issue like sustainability?
If you are teaching stuff that is well known, like negotiations or strategy, it doesn’t matter much who is teaching. Students’ expectations align with the content they are about to learn. For sustainability, especially back then but sometimes even now, students need to get a primer on the topic and be persuaded of its importance to business. And, the persuasion has to be soft persuasion, as there are still perceived to be normative qualities to it. In fact, it’s this very normativity that has made sustainability such a hot-button issue in the woke/anti-woke movements.
As well, I think one needs to give students space to express their own opinion. I didn’t ask students if they thought climate change was real, as I was convinced it was so.
The landscape seems different since the early 2000s. Fewer people are likely to ask if climate change is real. Do you think things have changed?
Yes, they have changed. Sustainability is more present in the popular press. These days I need to spend less time persuading students of its importance to business. However, there are still land mines. It’s a different kind of resistance than before, but it’s there.
For example, I teach in the core MBA program a class that runs over a number of months. At the start of my course, I can feel the positive energy. Many students are very excited about the content. Toward the end of the course, I can tell that the positive energy has ebbed.
For a long time, I couldn’t figure out why that happened, but I got some insight just this last summer. On the final day of class, a student came up to me and said, “Remember in our first class that I told you that I was so excited about the material?” “Of course,” I said. He responded: “This stuff is so very important, but I must say that you are brave.” I looked at him and said, “How am I brave? I’m teaching a topic I love.” And he said, “But there are all these people who are against it!”
This was an eye-opening statement. I honestly did not know there was so much polarization that I did not see. It turns out that students who supported sustainability were getting pushback from other students outside of class, online in group chats. I was sensing this sentiment in the classroom, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.
Another student came up later the same day, and said she thought they needed more sustainability content in the MBA classroom, not less. It’s so emotionally and normatively charged that students feel frustrated not being able to discuss it in the classroom, so they take it online. And it can get quite heated when it is unmoderated on an online platform.
Then how do business schools build future leaders who have a sustainable mindset?
I agree with the last student’s comment. We can’t teach sustainability in just a very small part of the curriculum. If it’s going to be taught right, then it needs sufficient time for people to really understand and marinate in the issues. Whereas I come in to say there is a bigger context to making business decisions, my colleagues in other courses are driving for individual or organizational success with a much narrower focus. What I teach contradicts what they teach, which creates dissonance with students.
How do business schools get the students to move beyond a focus on individual or organizational success?
Lately, I have been increasingly thinking that we need to de-politicize the discussion of sustainability. I’ve been advocating for systems thinking, which is an approach that almost every single student can embrace—whether or not they care about climate change.
The term sustainable development was coined in 1987 by the Brundtland Commission, and it was defined as development that meets the needs of present generations without compromising the needs of future generations. This idea is all about systems. It’s about zooming out to see the bigger picture and the world that we want to create and then zooming in to see how we can create that world.
Most business cases focus on the business and the short term. I will often challenge students to consider traditional case studies through a sustainability lens to encourage them to extend their field of view to society and to the long term. When I co-teach, we can take the tool of that discipline and then extend the time frame. An example is a finance case I co-teach. The case decision is whether an Australian company should buy a coal mine in Indonesia. The Net Present Value analysis that my finance colleague calculates shows a clear answer—yes, the company should buy the mine. I then extend the time horizons to that of a normal mine (20–50 years), include societal costs, and future uncertainty. The financial calculus flips from being a good purchase to being highly questionable.
In other courses, we do similar extensions. For example, in marketing, we discuss the investments in sustainable products that currently do not have well-defined markets. In operations, we talk about the social and environmental costs that are pushed upwards (and down) in supply chains. In strategy, we open up new business models and talk about the implications of firm-level growth on the planet.
Systems thinking asks students to recognize that the world is made up of nested systems with feedback loops. Even though we look to identify a single problem or issue and silver-bullet solutions, most problems are multi-faceted, and they should be thinking of ecologies of solutions, not single answers (Grewatsch et al., 2023).
My approach to systems thinking is part theoretical, drawing from Meadows’ (2008) ideas about dancing with systems, but more of it is simply practical. I try to embed new ways of thinking, so that students do not look only for cause and effect but try to determine long-term desirable outcomes and the measures needed to achieve those outcomes. I love working with hands-on tools like the Fishbanks simulation and the En-ROADs global climate solution simulator, both available online from MIT Sloan. I also have students engage in exercises of forecasting relative to foresighting. In addition, I have developed a tool, called the Compass, through my work at Innovation North that helps students see how systems thinking differs from design thinking. It’s accessible at innovationnorth.ca.
Most courses teach students to zoom into a specific tool or decision, but that’s not enough—they also need to zoom out to see the context in which these tools should be applied. Students need the tools AND an understanding of the broader system within which they operate. A systems mindset gives a theoretical foundation on which students can understand how to contextualize the conversations in their other courses.
I also think that once students realize the relationality of business, communities and the natural environment, they will be more inclined to see that harming the system will ultimately come back to bite them. They will come to understand that if we make the system unstable, it’ll be problematic. That’s why I’ve decided to take a systems mindset when teaching sustainability. In this way, I am shifting the focus from environmental sustainability to systems thinking, which is inclusive of many systems-related issues, including climate change, biodiversity loss, income inequality, and poverty, but also artificial intelligence safety and the future of work.
So, in your experience, there has been less backlash against systems thinking?
Yes, I believe so. We’ve taught it a few times and students of all sorts take the course, as they understand it’s a valuable analytical tool. We get many people who care about sustainability and big systems issues, but we also get people who are focused on decision analytics, management science, and operations. They all see the value of systems thinking as a means to an end, and do not really know what to expect at the beginning. Once they are in the course, they realize that systems thinking is not just a tool, but a way of seeing the world. Students tend to be comfortable in this space, as they are introduced to new ideas without a feeling that there are any normative judgements.
One framing that works particularly well is highlighting the importance of systems thinking when talking about disruptions. Students get very excited about disruptions—and for good reason because business is facing so many right now (Bansal & MacMillan, 2021). I can put climate and technology into the same conversation and appeal to people who care about either of these things because they are both systems that are being disrupted. Then I’m speaking to lots of people not just the ones that are concerned about climate change.
That is a nice trick.
Yes. But it’s not only a trick. Systems analysis gives us tools that can be applied to many disciplines, from architecture to agriculture to art. Given that systems thinking is a philosophy of sorts, as well as a tool, there is something quite deep about it. It meets people where they’re at. For those people who want just a tool, you say, “okay, here is systems mapping.” That works. Over time, however, they start to see the world through the lens of a systems map, which affects their world view.
Others may say “I want to go all in and really understand what this means philosophically.” With them you can start to talk about the meaning of disruptions and how to nudge systems to desired futures. Many of us are interested in changing a system of some kind—whether it’s changing the patriarchy or reducing racism or building a more resilient climate. Others care about financial systems resilience or maybe understanding how we can manage mental health issues with employees to help them get back to work in a way that is meaningful. The list goes on.
Since most of us have a system that we care about, this gives us all a starting place that allows everyone to participate. That’s partly why I shifted my teaching approach. I can’t help but take a normative position with sustainability because I care about it so deeply. Systems thinking allows me to operate in a more analytical space.
Can a systems thinking approach help people understand climate change?
Absolutely. There’s been five mass extinctions in the past. Four of those five were climate related. And we are clearly at a tipping point with climate right now as we start to experience increasingly frequent and catastrophic weather events. These are systems effects. One can’t make sense of increasing variance in temperature through linear thinking, but systems thinking requires looking at variance and outliers.
Is there hope?
We always need to hold hope, or we would stop trying to avert the climate crisis. Is there evidence to suggest that we can really avert the climate crisis? I do not know. But I need to believe there is.
I know you are leading a United Nations initiative for advancing responsible management education. What would you like to see business schools do differently? Move away from capitalism?
No, no. I’m not anti-capitalist. I think that business and markets have been critical in mobilizing resources and contributing to better lives. But capitalism has created distortions in some areas.
Let me explain what I mean. When you look at a map of the world, the poles of the map are distorted because the three-dimensional globe is compressed into two dimensions. I think there is a similar problem with capitalism. It is missing dimensionality and has become distorted at the edges.
What dimensions are missing? I think that there are three: time, which has led to organizations defaulting to the short term; space, which values multinationals over local organizations; and, scale, which has contributed to organizations seeking 10× growth. Put these issues together and we have runaway capitalism: businesses are trying to grow as much as possible, as quickly as possible.
I do not think the answer is to slow down organizations—what is known as degrowth—but we need to see the distortions in the systems caused by ignoring the dimensions of time, space, and scale. By introducing these dimensions more explicitly into business, we can see the value of the long term, local organizations, and smaller scale. In doing so, we can reduce some of the distortions created by capitalism.
Would it be fair to say that with this new, undistorted capitalism, leaders would have to consider the society and the environment in which they are embedded before they act? Or is that going too far?
No, that is absolutely right. We can see an example of that right now. Indigenous peoples of the world own 5% of the land, yet 85% of biodiversity lives on that land. They have a systems perspective. They see land and people interconnected. When we take from the land, we must give back to it. This is reciprocity or interactivity. It’s a different way of thinking.
Scientists on the other hand think in categories or variables that are intentionally separate, and they try to predict and control outcomes. If we want higher performance, we adjust the levers. That’s a Western colonial view of science.
We normally assume a variance ontology, which seeks cause and effect, so that we can predict and control the outcomes. Generally, we want to see more profits, so are looking for the levers that will contribute to higher profits. The problem with this is two-fold. First, it assumes we can figure out these single levers when they are actually nested in a whole lot of relationships. Second, it forces a short-term mindset, as cause and effect can only be determined for temporally proximate relationships. So, students seek short-term solutions, as that is all they can control.
A systems perspective offers a different way of seeing the world. We take a process ontology. We are more interested in relationships of people with each other and the stuff around us, and how we interact over time. A process ontology does not seek to predict and control outcomes, but to understand the system. Through this understanding, we can start to nudge systems to our desirable futures.
Did you know that in the Blackfoot language, there are no nouns? All words are verbs because they’re always in a process of acting. Fire isn’t a fire—it’s burning. Water isn’t water—it’s flowing. When you change words into ING words, you change your worldview, because then you start to realize that you are part of something. We are not static beings, we are always in the process of becoming in relation to others. I AM only in relation to you here, now.
That strong process ontology is a systems ontology. I don’t know if we can really shift worldviews by this much, but we can start to bring some of this thinking into the classroom. The more that students start to see themselves as part of the community, the more they embrace a sustainability mindset.
Tell me more about how we can encourage systems thinking in the classroom.
Let me give you an example from a recent class experience. I asked students to work in small groups to map what they thought was going to happen to the world in the future. They identified the big trends, the causes of the trends, and the outcomes. When they reported back, they mentioned many negative trends, such as increasing polarization, worsening mental health, more volatile weather events. These were caused by technology, capitalism, social media. And, the outcomes were catastrophic, such as World War III, conflict, and human extinction. I asked them how they were feeling, and they said, “wow, this is bad, we’re kind of feeling depressed.”
Then I asked them to draw the world they wanted to see in the future. They came back from their breakout rooms in less than half the time, and I was gobsmacked by how similar the images were across the groups. There were windmills, trees, children, and diverse types of people, many of whom were holding hands. I asked them how they were feeling, and they said “great—that was so much fun.” The whole room felt creative, collaborative and energized. They all wanted to just go and create the future that was depicted. And I wanted to join them!
What do you think happened? In the first exercise, I focused attention on boxes and arrows and to the prediction of the future based on today’s problems. In the second, I had them draw relationships and imagine the future they wanted, so they could create it. The first narrowed their point of view, the second expanded it. I think when there’s alignment, we tend to be more cooperative, we say, “how can we make it happen?” We feel more agentic and creative because we think about the future and say, “what do I have to do now?” Initially, I asked them to forecast, which extends the past to the present, but everything changed when I asked them to foresight, which has them decide where they want to be and think about how to get there. When we do this forecast/foresight exercise, participants naturally start thinking about potential disruptions.
The people who are giving us future images right now are the Jeff Bezos and Elon Musks of the world. They are sending us to space, selling us stuff, shaping public discourse, and developing future technologies. But when we ask most people what they want for the future, they don’t draw technology or space travel. They draw communities, fish, and kids playing.
When it comes to education, we need to get our students not to think only about themselves and their future careers, but how they can be part of a future they can create collectively together. This will help to focus their energy on how they fit in the big picture, rather than how they can individually fill the frame.
Some people argue that we need our business schools to embed a sustainability focus throughout the whole learning experience if we are going to change how businesses are run. How would you go about doing that?
If I was running a business school, I would ask students in the first week to imagine the bigger context, specifically where we want to be and where we are now. They could then go onto learning tools, but they would constantly be asked to think about how those tools could potentially help to create the future they said they want. When we have a North Star, we will move collectively toward it. That’s a systems approach, not an analytical one. It forces us to start with the whole, not just the parts; and to start with the future, not just the present.
The second thing I would do if I was leading a business school is to have students focus more on challenges and opportunities, on “what can we do?”, which will make it clear that they need to collaborate to tackle these challenges.
Recently, I asked a doctoral student to watch some videos in which we had executives talk about their ideal future—their North Star. At first when she watched the videos, she said she didn’t find them very interesting. But then one day, she said, “I realize that when you asked them about the North Star, everything afterwards changed. They really started to think bigger.” Even the execs noticed, they said, “We’re not even asking the right questions anymore.”
This morning, she said, “you know, all we do is just talk about problems, problems, problems. If you’re always thinking about problems, it’s always short term. And your day is just full thinking about your problems. When do we actually have people sort of step back and ask themselves “Where do we want to go?” She was right. Talking about problems without talking about where we want to go is, well, a problem.
Is this like asking them about their purpose?
It is a purpose discussion, but I think that a lot of the research on purpose is very much still normative saying “you need to find a purpose and you need to think beyond profits.” I’m not saying that. Instead, I think purpose is simply about each person or organization figuring out what is their desirable future. A desirable future cannot be imposed on people, they need to find it for themselves. What’s very interesting is that when we ask people or organizations for their desirable future, they inevitably widen their field of view and talk about the future state of the world, not just about themselves.
It seems that you enjoy teaching. Do you?
Teaching is fun. It’s really fun. I love the creativity of learning the material myself and then reflecting on how best to convey it to an audience. But I admit that I’m an introvert, and I often am anxious when performing in front of students.
Wait. You get anxiety teaching?
Yes, I get anxiety. Yet, I also get joy. I liken it to sky diving. Scary jumping out, but once one is in the air, it’s exhilarating.
When you are discussing sustainability with students in the classroom, do you find it difficult to manage different ideological viewpoints?
That’s a good question, and I think that the answer is no. I love the Socratic method and debate. I like pushing people to deepen their ideas and consider the implications, which also pushes my own learnings. Different ideologies actually help in the learning process. But this doesn’t happen quickly. It takes time to allow people to explore their own point of view and listen to others. My biggest challenge is when there just isn’t enough time for that exploration. It’s important for students to feel that they have had time to express a point of view and not be shut down.
It’s important to create a space where everybody feels safe. If you cut people off when they are expressing something ideological, they can feel disregarded and injured.
It’s important to build a relationship with students, so that they can have important conversations. And it’s not just about my relationship with the student, but maybe more importantly, their relationship with each other. We can’t see those dynamics easily, so we need to give them space to speak to their peers and to be given dignity for their position.
Given your extensive experience with industry partners and practitioners, how might faculty (as teachers and researchers) best interact with those outside of academia in order to address grand challenges around sustainability?
I love it when industry partners come into the classroom and not only talk about their successes, but candidly also talk about their challenges and uncertainties. Students want to be inspired by what is happening in business, but the good news stories make success seem straightforward, albeit rare. Students learn much more from uncertainties, tensions, even learnings from failed attempts, as it shows that most decisions are messy. It gives students space to noodle over the person they would choose to be in similar circumstances. I think having practical examples that are positive or sustainability-positive helps students model behaviors and see possibilities.
You are obviously a highly impactful scholar, engaged service contributor, and effective educator. What advice do you have for new faculty trying to juggle these different roles and competing demands at the beginning of their careers?
That’s a great question. An academic career is hard. If you want to do well on all fronts of research, teaching, and service to the community, it’s just bloody hard. It’s hardest at the beginning because you are still trying to learn to do good research and to teach effectively. So, what advice would I give?
First, do not compare yourself to others. Play your own game. The beauty of our work is that we get to define who we want to be. So, pick an institution that lets you be yourself and consider yourself an artist. Some people will like your art, others won’t. Some art takes a long time to mature, other art is quick. Do work that makes you happy when you are doing it, and success will eventually come.
Second, you should focus on the real-world concepts that interest you. I get my ideas from what I read about or experience, which is not yet being captured by research articles. This is partly why I love qualitative research, because it often starts with the phenomena and in contexts that are super interesting. My personal experiences and passions serve to illuminate insights in theory that have not yet been noticed. You can add a lot of value by looking into the things out there that fascinate you.
Can you tie this to what you were saying before about having people focus on the future? Would you say that for new faculty, they should envision the future they want to have?
That’s interesting. Yes, absolutely. Though I recognize it’s hard for early faculty to think about their desired future, as PhD programs focus so much on certain types of publications. One of my junior colleagues, years ago, was a tremendous scholar, yet it wasn’t clear where she wanted to make her mark. She said years later to me, as an award-winning scholar, that it was my question, “what kind of scholar do you want to be” that forced her to think not just about publishing, but her future self. We need to be asking of our PhD students: “Who do you want to be? What gets you excited?” When they figure that out, they will do more interesting work.
Which part of your job brings you the most joy?
I love almost all aspects of my job, and it’s the diversity of the job that makes all of it so incredibly rewarding. In a previous life, I worked in public policy and in management consulting and I was always thinking about other careers. Since the day I started my PhD program I have never thought about doing anything else. I love the independence I have to explore ideas, and I love working with others in doing so. I’m particularly excited these days in learning about systems thinking to tackle complex sustainability issues. Yes, it’s so much fun. I love, love what I do.
Which part of your job brings you the least joy?
The anxiety of performing in front of a group. I still fret over events in front of large groups. But, as I said, the run up is anxiety creating, but there is almost always a post-event glow.
Thank you for sharing that. It’s easy to forget that every person has challenges. One more question, if you could go back in time, what teaching advice would you give to yourself at the start of your career?
It’s the advice that I would probably give myself now: don’t think about yourself when teaching. Just think about the students. When I’m anxious, I’m focused on myself. How am I coming off? Am I going to make a fool of myself? In the end, the students don’t really care about the surface stuff. If I stay focused on them, we both have a better learning experience.
Commentary
Integrating a sustainability mindset in the business leaders of tomorrow is not only a critical responsibility for business schools, as highlighted by the comments of Dr. Bansal, it is also a challenging one. The crises facing us are so vast that in 2015, the United Nations released 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) as a roadmap to save a struggling world (United Nations, 2015). One of them, SDG 4.7, notes the importance of ensuring that all learners are given the knowledge and skills to promote sustainable development by the year 2030. Although it makes sense to have all students learn how to be sustainable, there is recognition that business schools may be especially well positioned to impact how future business leaders both think about sustainability and respond to related challenges. This influence is reflected in the creation of PRME, an UN-supported initiative to raise the profile of sustainability in business education with a mission to give students the ability to make decisions that balance financial, environmental, and social goals. This responsibility is also aligned with the standards of the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB), a major accreditation body, that asks business schools to show evidence of how they are making a positive impact on the world. Often, the accreditation reporting is related to how well each institution is moving toward the 17 SDGs (Mijnhardt et al., 2024). While research related to the key SDGs is important, business schools also need to show that they have promoted the goals through curricular design and teaching practices.
The purpose of this interview was to tap into the experiences of an accomplished sustainability scholar to explore her approach to teaching a critical topic. Her insights may help further the ability of instructors to foster a mindset in future leaders that can help to make businesses operate in a more sustainable manner.
Several major themes emerged from the interview with Dr. Bansal. First, she notes that students may differ in terms of their openness to the topic of sustainability. The traditional view that sets business as disparate from society and the environment is deeply entrenched and not easily displaced by an intertwined or embedded approach that acknowledges the inherent connections between the three entities (Marcus et al., 2010). An “anti-woke” mentality can exist within a business school (sometimes beneath the surface) and push against the research evidence, making it difficult for an instructor to develop a transformative classroom experience on the topic of sustainability. Students who chose to come to a business school for the purpose of making money may be considerably skeptical of classes that talk about the benefits of making society or the environment a priority. While this anti-sustainability sentiment may be latent in the classroom, there can be other non-instructor related channels through which it gains traction. When there is pushback against a non-profit motive in discussions about how to achieve sustainability, the instructor may become a target for any discontent. To deal with this, it is important for business schools and instructors to ensure sustainability content is woven throughout the curricula and used as a means to contextualize the ideas from other disciplines. Instructors can also ensure they offer enough space and time for students to share their ideas in a safe environment.
Kisfalvi and Oliver (2015) share approaches to creating a safe environment, including developing a no-judgment norm, setting ground rules, preserving sufficient time for discussion and reflection of controversial/unexpected ideas, building high trust levels (especially between instructor and students), showing respect for divergent perspectives, ceding full control of the discussion, careful listening, instructor willingness to work through their own issues and emotions, and acting as a role model for classroom behavior. Similarly, Khilji (2022) offers mechanisms for creating a psychologically safe space for participants to connect with each other and the material.
In addition, it may help to learn from instructors who are challenged to tackle other controversial topics. For instance, Dachner and Beatty (2023) review the teaching practices of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) instructors. They highlight a number of ways to create a sense of belonging and safety in the classroom, including building rapport, determining ground rules, using guided sensemaking, and naming feelings and reactions. They also mention other pedagogical methods that are consistent with Dr. Bansal’s techniques, including service-learning opportunities and relying on Indigenous knowledge. Allen (2022) notes that how an instructor handles controversial topics in class can be an important influence on how students deal with controversies in the workplace.
Second, Dr. Bansal offers some techniques for bypassing the resistance that might exist amongst a subset of students. Instilling a systems thinking mindset allows all students to consider sustainability issues without the necessity to discard or downgrade a strong profit motive. When the focus is on understanding the system, the tension that comes from differing value systems is not generated. Still, students who take a broader systems view may be situated to see how environmental and societal factors influence and are influenced by business (Colombo, 2023). In other words, it is not possible to successfully take a systems thinking view and continue to see business as separate from the planet and the humans that inhabit it. While values are crucial, it is behaviors that matter most (Pappas, 2012).
To become a systems thinker a student must learn about many things, including feedback loops, information flows, stock and flow structures, mental models, and archetypes (see Meadows, 2008 for an overview). Such thinking is more closely aligned with a process, rather than a variance, ontology, an approach often taken by Indigenous groups (see Gould et al., 2023). Students become able to see not only the bigger picture and the relationships between the parts of the system, they also can recognize the ever-changing nature of the world. Dichotomies become less relevant than connections; change becomes more reliable than constants. Arguably, this will be a critical lesson in the “fourth industrial revolution” (Schwab, 2016), also known as the age of disruption (Bansal, 2019). Preparing for discrete, predictable, manageable challenges is no longer a reasonable default strategy. Leaders must learn how to find “the beat of a system” (Meadows, 2008) and behave accordingly.
André (2024) warns that it is important to ensure that students not only engage in systems thinking, they must also have sufficient systems knowledge. They have to gain a solid understanding of the societal view (well beyond the business perspective; Bansal & Song, 2017). However, business schools tend to focus on individual- and organizational-level issues, which may make it very difficult to understand and tackle the macro-level/societal crises that we are facing (Grewatsch et al., 2023). For instance, PRME goals can be seen as residing at the meso (or organizational) level (André, 2024).
In addition to teaching students about systems, Dr. Bansal advocates for a focus on a desired future. Class conversations about climate change and other sustainability crises can be emotionally disturbing to students and instructors alike. Rather than ignoring such feelings, Skilling et al. (2023) suggest that the despair and apathy that arise from a knowledge of current dangers should be acknowledged and discussed prior to moving toward a systems analysis of causes and the opportunity to co-construct solutions. Consistent with that framework, Dr. Bansal does not ask students simply to extrapolate today’s problems to the future, she offers information on systems thinking principles and challenges students to develop an image of a desirable future. This tends to generate an inspiring picture, a sense of hope, and a motivation to act. Even without prompting, this type of futuring of a North Star (or guiding light) can result in visions that include societal and environmental considerations naturally. Thus, thinking about a better world in the future seems to prime students to take a collective-focused, rather than an individual-focused perspective. More research is needed to explore the temporal perceptions and assumptions that influence strategic business decisions, especially those related to sustainability (Bansal et al., 2022; Slawinski & Bansal, 2015).
Rather than calling for the destruction of the capitalist system, Dr. Bansal’s pedagogical approach may allow business schools to address how to approach capitalism differently. She notes the distortions that have led to our current crisis, calling for a more nuanced understanding of several dimensions of capitalism, including (a) time, to go beyond a short-term view; (b) space, to value local as well as global; and (c) scale, to reduce a growth-at-any-cost mentality. An economic system that goes beyond isolated silos and works for all stakeholders is likely the only path to true sustainability.
Input from multiple stakeholders can start in the classroom. Dr. Bansal models a multi-perspective view in her teaching by consistently including faculty from other disciplines into courses/conversations on sustainability (for a review of her recent teaching activity, see Bansal, n.d.).
Third, Dr. Bansal offers suggestions to faculty who are new to the profession. She argues for the importance of developing a career focus that aligns with one’s personal interests. When an individual cares deeply about a topic or task, they are more likely to immerse themselves in it and dig for a deep understanding of what is happening. She serves as a role model for how to approach teaching and research in a way that aligns with one’s core values. Echoing advice similar to that recently offered by Dr. Joan Gallos (Kenworthy et al., 2024), Dr. Bansal encourages junior faculty to find their own path, even if the methods are controversial. Although it may seem safer to try and follow a traditional trajectory that is strongly marketed in graduate programs (e.g., a focus on research publications in a select group of journals), success is more likely to come to those who listen to their internal voice of what matters. With the view that our work is the art that we offer the world, she suggests that the best output is built from the essence of the artist. Each of us comes to the profession with a unique set of experiences, inspirations, and passions. Setting aside the thoughts that make us unique to slog away at tasks that are not personally meaningful or joy-inducing will rarely produce work that illuminates, or makes meaning of the world. Only by tapping our unique view of life can we truly engage with others in a powerful way. In the words of eminent management scholar James March, beauty is of utmost importance and is found when “ideas have some form of elegance or grace or surprise” (Coutu, 2006, p. 84). Such beauty is more likely to be created when the soul of the scholar is at the forefront of the work process. Dr. Bansal serves as an example of a scholar who has had the wisdom to not stick solely to the well-trodden path laid out by the Academy and instead built new trails that looked intriguing to her on a personal level. Honoring her instincts and curiosity has led her to unexplored places many of the rest of us wanted to see and understand, as well.
When it comes time to face a classroom of students, she suggests stepping away from our typical “us and them” view. Rather than worrying about how they are perceived by the audience in a performative sense, instructors might focus instead on what the learning experience is like for students and join them on the learning journey. Instructors are not simply content providers, they play an important role in making material relevant (Bartunek & Ren, 2022). Students are more likely to open themselves to the learning experience when they believe that the instructor brings their personal values and passions and stays “present” in the classroom, co-creating learning spaces for both instructor and student to make meaning of the content together (Bartunek & Ren, 2022; Grant & Hurd, 2010). Professors can encourage heightened content relevance by allowing room for different perspectives, modeling and acknowledging vulnerability, and embracing emotional responses (Bartunek & Ren, 2022).
Conclusion
The climate crisis, social unrest, and widespread inequities are strangling our world. The future feels uncertain and bleak (Richardson et al., 2023). Business schools have an important role in addressing this crisis. While there has been an increase in sustainability content in business schools, business instructors must do more to educate our future leaders to prepare for what is coming (Bansal et al., 2025). Many students are eager to learn more about sustainability, but there is evidence that sometimes the lessons fall on disinterested (or even disgruntled) ears. We need to be able to give students a safe space to zoom out to take a broader view of the processes through which organizations impact their society and physical environment and vice versa. Each piece is part of the same open system. Only then can we do capitalism better and help tomorrow’s leaders develop the ecologies of solutions that will contribute to a more prosperous and sustainable future.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I offer deep thanks to Dr. Tima Bansal for graciously opening herself up to the interview process and sharing her ideas and experiences. Also, I gratefully acknowledge the thoughtful and constructive support from Editor Melanie Robinson and two anonymous reviewers who helped to situate the interview content within the relevant literature.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
