A small wins approach to addressing climate change

Firms and industries around the world are under increasing pressure to articulate their responses to climate change. Multi-disciplinary work spanning policy, science, anthropology, and management literature has contributed on many levels. All of these approaches make a valuable contribution and our aim in this paper is to bring them together in a way that might help researchers and managers investigate and engage with this seemingly intractable issue. Specifically, we complement Weick’s (1984) small wins approach to intractable social issues with Pacala and Socolow’s (2004) ‘stabilisation wedges’ approach to keeping carbon in check, and use the latter to extend small wins so that it may be applied to the broad issue of climate change. We develop an outcome-focussed approach that can be used descriptively by scholars or prescriptively by managers that has scalable, flexible, problem-reducing, dynamic, and temporal aspects. We focus on applying the approach at firm and industry levels, and set out possible directions for future research.