Revisioning Sustainability

Even though sustainability has gained wide-spread recognition, we have barely begun the journey. To gain real traction, the movement needs to take several key steps including addressing energy, food, water, and health challenges. However, a much over-looked and understated challenge we need to address is how we think about sustainability. Sustainability is a vision of the future. Yet, it currently remains chained to past thinking like working in silos, not valuing organizational learning, and exhibiting a lack of internal and external institutional awareness. Our most popular concept of sustainability is a salient example of this as it organizes itself into economic, social, and environmental silos. The field of Knowledge Management offers sustainability concepts, strategies, and perspectives that can help operationalize our ideals and optimize a vision capable of leading us into the future. We will find that the principles of knowledge management have the potential to transform sustainability into a force of the present that thinks into the future.