Leadership for sustainability: the importance of sustaining imaginative work

Abstract

Sustainability thinking in enterprise strategies has emerged as a new concern for leaders in many industries and countries. It has spread like a virus in abstract corporate visions communication. We propose that more attention be devoted to leveraging the concrete developmental work from an action-based leadership for sustainability perspective. Our conceptual paper seeks to understand sustainability and change thinking in micro-practices, which can open for reusing resources, transforming core processes and offerings, and innovating in corporate missions. For this conceptual aim, we combine processual philosophy and sustainabilityoriented design thinking with exemplary practices in one specialized business enterprise to help us understand how and why micro sustainability practices can be born, formed, and shaped and how they can evolve into something foundational for an entire value-creation. The focused enterprise in this paper, Flokk, has pioneered sustainability thinking in both its design and development and its entire philosophizing towards the users. In contrast to prevailing management beliefs towards unconstrained creativity, enduring imaginative design and development efforts and leading with some concrete constraining criteria can become beneficial for leveraging sustainable practices, as shown in this puzzling office chair-maker case.