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The business environment is increasingly fraught with societal disruptions—caused by factors such as pandemics, climate change and the probability of sentient machines—that are fundamentally different than the industry disruptions that firms have experienced and determined how to overcome. Societal disruptions create chaotic ambiguity and unknowable futures. This paper offers an approach to strategic management in the context of societal disruptions, employing purpose-driven “smart power” to harmonize the organization and the environment and promote both economic and social sustainability.

The paper integrates the construct of smart power that blends hard and soft power, the concepts of purpose and identity that define what is core, aspirational, enduring and distinctive about the organization and the techniques of taming wicked problems in order to design processes and structures that can function in the context of social disruptions.

The paper offers a strategic management approach that employs purpose-driven smart power to overcome the challenge and thrive in the context of chaotic ambiguity.

The approach offers practical guidelines for designing processes and structures that can guide strategic decision making in organizations challenged by societal disruptions.

The distinctive and daunting challenge posed by societal disruptions is delineated, and constructs and frameworks from multiple disciplines are uniquely integrated to potentially tame the chaotic ambiguity and unknowable futures created by these disruptions.

This study aims to offer a strategic management response to societal disruptions of the magnitude triggered by the agricultural, industrial and information revolutions. These pose challenges that are much greater and different in kind than the industry-wide disruptions that businesses have learned to manage. Pandemics, climate change, biotech and artificial intelligence guarantee that such societal disruptions will be an inescapable and recurring reality.

The paper builds on the strategic management responses to wicked problems, which possess in microcosm the chaotic ambiguity that characterizes societal disruptions.

The authors propose a management process that affirms a sense of identity, identifies robust actions, adopts a real-options approach and uses a platform organization.

The primary limitation is that the recommendations and findings are extrapolations of organizational practices in analogous situations. No examples of formal management processes specifically designed to address societal disruptions were identified.

The practical implications are significant. The specific recommendations in the paper directly address strategic management practice in organizations.

The social implications are integral to the motivation of the paper as it describes the intrinsic characteristics of societal change and transformation, enabling organizations to interact with society on a dynamic basis.

While there has been growing interest and research into business and industry disruptions, the challenge of societal disruptions, which is the focus of this paper, has not been directly addressed.

If there is any consensus on the nature of the management challenge today, it is that business environments are more dynamic, competitive, and unpredictable than ever before and that businesses have to be more flexible, organic, and innovative in how they structure themselves. Different environmental characteristics and different organizational forms require new and different ways of defining business strategy.

In this interview John C Camillus, author of Wicked Strategies: How Companies Conquer Complexity and Confound Competitors shares his approach to identifying “wicked problems” that firms can then explore to find growth opportunities.

The “wicked strategies” approach that Camillus proposes is designed to convert disruptive technologies into innovative business models, reconcile conflicted stakeholders by engaging them in co-creation of value and transform an unknowable future into a desired one through the alchemy of a Feed-Forward Framework.

Camillus’ proposed Feed-Forward Framework enables and employs the process of experimentation.

Camillus’ multi-level approach starts by discerning unique “wicked problems,” then applies a “Feed-Forward Framework” that analyzes multiple stakeholder interests and develops scenarios to discover and test possible opportunities and robust strategies.

The role of the corporate headquarters that Camillus proposes differs from the approach that is conventionally employed – it focuses intensely on human resources and competency development.

This paper focuses on the concept of fit as a topic of research. The concept of fit has been viewed as an internal consistency among key strategic decisions or the alignment between strategic choices and critical contingencies with the environment (external), organization (internal), or both (external and internal). A number of research perspectives or approaches related to fit are presented.Research design problems are discussed: definition of terms, theoretical issues, and empirical issues. Emphasis is on how key variables or dimensions of fit are defined and measured in research.

A six-celled matrix is proposed as a conceptual scheme to distinguish different perspectives of fit and to portray congruence relationships more accurately. The matrix includes three common dimensions: strategy, organization, and environment. The matrix also suggests two levels of strategy—corporate or business—and three domains of fit—external, internal, or integrated. These suggest different research perspectives for the study of fit. Examples from the literature are provided to illustrate and support this conceptual scheme. Finally, implications for management and furtherstudy are outlined.

The role of environmental scanning. The key to effective strategy lies in matching a firm's capabilities with opportunities in the external environment. This gives environmental scanning a central role in the strategy process. However, the effectiveness of the scanning activity depends on the balanced judgment of the planners—you don't want too limited an analysis, nor do you want to waste time on irrelevant factors.

In today's highly dynamic, unpredictably changing business environment, traditional strategic‐planning approaches are of doubtful value. In 1995, the American Productivity & Quality Center (APQC) began a series of consortium benchmarking studies on strategic planning. The first study, completed in 1996, identified several innovative practices and surfaced challenges faced by companies in highly dynamic business environments. Consequently, strategic planning in fast‐cycle environments became the focus of the second study, “Reinventing Strategic Planning for a Dynamic Environment,” which was completed in February 1997.

The purpose of this introduction is fourfold: (1) to articulate the reasons for the special issue; (2) to highlight some of the fundamental issues related to the management research on COVID-19; (3) to introduce the authors and to summarize their contributions to this special issue; and (4) to provide some suggestions for future research pertaining to global challenges and business in general.

This article introduces the special issue by addressing the following four points related to the COVID-19 pandemic: (1) conceptualization of the crisis, (2) the role of organizations, (3) challenges of the global pandemic and (4) business–society relationships. We briefly relate the papers in this special issue to these four points and we conclude with some thoughts on how to move forward on research in this domain.

The COVID-19 pandemic has proven to be one of the most important challenges to mankind and to organizations in recent years, and many organizations have proven to be very resilient in the face of this. Effective leadership, communication with stakeholders, global organizations and new organizational forms such as cross-sectoral collaborations have all proven important in dealing with this crisis. They will also likely be important for dealing with even more serious crises in the future such as climate change and other challenges referred to in the papers in this issue.

This paper provides an overview and summary of the implications of the papers in this special issue. As such, its originality derives mostly from the originality of the papers contained in this special issue.

The purpose of this chapter is to examine how a multinational enterprise (MNE) makes sense of the ‘wicked problem’ of corporate social responsibility (CSR).

We analyse the single case of an acknowledged leader in CSR, Unilever. We undertake an interpretive textual analysis of how Unilever has accounted for its progress towards greater social and environmental responsibility in its annual social and environmental reports published between 2000 and 2012.

We identify enduring themes as well as what has changed in this 12-year period. We conclude that while Unilever has made definite progress, becoming more confident and ambitious in its plans and achievements, it potentially runs the risk of reducing CSR to a ‘tame problem’ that can be solved through technical solutions that offer win-win solutions and do not challenge the economic theory of the firm.

We show the value of using the perspective of ‘wicked problems’ to understand the complexity of the CSR challenge facing the MNE.

We suggest that the current approach of measuring CSR progress has limitations and potentially negative side effects.

Our chapter offers a novel conceptualisation of CSR, as well as empirical evidence of CSR as a process of corporate sensemaking in the face of ‘wicked problems’.