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Strategy in the Anthropocene

Recognition Year(s): 2025
School: Emlyon Business School
Location: France

Emlyon Business School has partnered with low-carbon strategic consulting firm Carbone 4 to create the innovative Strategy in the Anthropocene project. It enables management scholars and business school students to investigate, alongside engineers and scientists, how organizational and natural sciences can be combined to design sustainable and desirable futures compatible with planetary boundaries. Both partners believe Anthropocene-borne business and societal problems may be effectively addressed if and only if business schools and management scholars forge creative spaces to define such futures.

Call to Action

Emlyon sees that humanity is facing multiple grand challenges. Capitalism’s inability to address systemic vulnerabilities in the natural world—such as climate change, biodiversity loss, and access to resources—and the social world, such as income inequality, has generated concern in public and private stakeholder communities.

There is a growing belief that the age of human impact on Earth, the Anthropocene, calls for businesses to urgently interact, coordinate, and strategize like never before, or the future will be anything but an extension of the past. Business schools play a role in equipping current businesses and future leaders with the tools to “do the right thing” in the Anthropocene and to align their corporate and investment strategies with environmental and social needs.

To do so will take a genuine reexamination of the foundations and philosophy of corporate strategy and business education. It will require training future leaders to consider multiple perspectives, rely on biophysical sciences to rigorously appreciate planetary boundaries, behave as future-minded professionals, and steadily maintain a high level of moral awareness.

The need is twofold. On the one hand, it is necessary to seize the opportunities and control the risks associated with these unprecedented circumstances, and on the other, to build confidence internally in organizations and externally with all stakeholders.

Innovation Description

Through the Emlyon Business School and Carbone 4 partnership, MBA and first-year MSc in Management students engage in a novel educational experience: the Sustainable Futures program. In its current iteration, the initiative leverages and combines business education know-how from Emlyon Business School faculty with biophysics and system dynamics consulting knowledge from Carbone 4 experts.

Sustainable Futures is a four-part course. In its first section, it introduces master’s students (1,200 per year) and MBA participants (100 per year) to the fundamentals of analyzing the “worldview” of a live, learning organization. In this context, “worldview” is understood as the deepest set of beliefs held by the organization’s leadership team about how the world works. This set of beliefs largely shapes the organization’s strategy.

In the second stage, students ask questions to identify current macroenvironmental forces that have previously been ignored, misunderstood, or unimaginable for the organization’s leadership team.

In the third portion of the program, faculty introduce students to the art of creative writing to craft alternative future scenarios. This is done under biophysical constraints, with rigorous descriptions supplied by Carbone 4 experts.

Finally, students prototype and design fiction-inspired immersive experiences in the form of short improv theater plays. These allow the organization’s leadership team to experience alternative futures and stress-test and broaden their current worldview. Leadership can then better understand the socioecological foundations and impact of their actions and strategies at individual, organizational, and systemic levels.

Innovation Impact

The innovative partnership between Emlyon Business School and Carbone 4 has already impacted various stakeholders. Since the initiative was featured in the Master in Management and MBA programs in the 2023–24 academic year, over 2,400 master’s students and 150 executive education participants have participated.

In addition, over 60 learning organizations—including small- and medium-sized enterprises, multinational corporations, and nongovernmental organizations—and 100 leadership team representatives have participated in the four-step protocol and its immersive experiences.

The high engagement has resulted in an editorial partnership with Harvard Business Review France and the kickoff of a short case studies collection on businesses in the Anthropocene. Three articles have been published so far on topics such as the future of space exploration and the gas and technology company Air Liquide.

The partnership also birthed a unique scholarly colloquium that was held in June 2024 in the Chamonix-Mont-Blanc Valley, France. Leveraging the networks of both Carbone 4 and Emlyon Business School, it brought together biophysics experts, business leaders, and students to explore potential alternatives to business-as-usual strategizing that are compatible with planetary boundaries.

The partnership has also impacted other stakeholders. Public authorities and governmental bodies have been invited to give presentations and participate in roundtables. Strategy in the Anthropocene has already been featured at the 2024 annual Lyon Chamber of Commerce and Industry meeting and was featured in November 2024 in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Government Foresight Community masterclass series.

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