Abstract

The year 2015 saw an agreement of 195 member countries of the United Nations to adopt what is known as 17 “Sustainable Development Goals ”, a joint commitment to end poverty, ensure prosperity for all and protect the integrity of the planet.These Global Goals, officially known as “Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development,” provide a global framework for the world’s actors to effect significant large system change. They focus on globally intractable issues such as complete eradication of poverty and hunger, good health and wellbeing for all, gender equality, and reduced inequality, among other laudable and exceedingly difficult goals. Companies are increasingly part of addressing the Global Goals in multi-stakeholder initiatives. This chapter suggests that corporate strategists can learn from these international multi-stakeholder initiatives about how to shift companies towards sustainable world-making. Based on successful cases of international collaboration it introduces a radically new approach to strategy: the concept of stewarding transformative changes collectively. It reflects on transformative design principles that made international stakeholder collaboration for sustainability successful and suggests bringing collaborative human competencies back into the focus of strategy design and implementation. The chapter redefines sustainability-oriented strategic management as the achievement of a dynamic vitality that positively impacts the wellbeing of internal stakeholders, the financial viability of the company and the society. On this basis a conceptual architecture is introduced that functions as a meta-level guidance to improve existing strategic management frameworks in the three phases co-sensing, co-designing and co-creating. The chapter concludes with an outlook on how transformative processes can accelerate sustainability transformations.