In a recent article in the Journal of Management Studies, we ask a simple but demanding question: how can organization and management scholars make sense of complex global problems such as climate change, financial instability, public health crises, or other “grand challenges”?
This question matters for two reasons. First, grand challenges are not purely technical problems. They are coordination problems whose solutions depend on interlocking decisions across organizations, markets, networks, and institutions—a terrain where our field claims expertise. Second, as coordination problems, grand challenges are exceptionally complex. They raise the bar for what counts as useful knowledge.
Our answer is straightforward in principle but demanding in practice. Scholars make sense of complex problems much like everyone else—managers, policymakers, activists, and voters included. What distinguishes them is not superior insight, but their position. That position creates opportunities to intervene entrepreneurially in how societies organize collective action to tackle grand challenges—bridging gaps between systems and, in doing so, redirecting deliberation.
Not so different after all
It is hardly radical to suggest that scholars think like everyone else. To buttress this argument, we draw on two classic theories.
The Carnegie School introduced the idea of bounded rationality: people act through simplified representations of the world. When such representations are sufficiently aligned, organization results. Complementarily, the “economies of worth” framework from French social science articulates how shared models are created, contested, and revised through collective communication and evaluation.
From this perspective, scholars are no more—and no less—boundedly rational or critically capable than other actors. Scholarly models of the world are themselves simplified, provisional, and open to contestation. What sets them apart is their focus. Rather than making decisions directly—whether to approve a project or price a risk—scholars typically study how decisions are made, connected, and sustained over time. We refer to these arrangements as deliberative systems: the processes and structures through which organizations, markets, networks, and institutions coordinate action.
A distinctive vantage point
Whatever their empirical form, deliberative systems share several features. They are distributed, loosely coupled, contestable, and open-ended. This holds for routine decisions as much as for grand challenges.
The reason is straightforward. Bounded rationality and critical capacity are universal. Actors make sense of complex situations by linking general values and abstract goals—including competing moral principles—to specific courses of action.
Scholars navigate deliberative systems in the same way. Their interpretations are shaped, first, by the socioeconomic conditions they consider desirable, and second, by research standards in their disciplines. These commitments act as twin orienting points. Together, they allow scholars to analyze deliberative systems while also identifying opportunities to reshape them through targeted, situated interventions. For instance, one of the studies we cite in our article examines deliberations around marine conservation and how crowdsourcing can be used to accelerate sustainability initiatives across multiple stakeholders.
Bridges and Windows
The interventions scholars are best placed to imagine rarely sit squarely within existing deliberative systems. More often, they sit between them. Rather than prescribing decisions, such interventions propose new connections through which deliberation can travel across organizational and institutional boundaries.
These interventions may be comparatively modest in scope but can still be guided by an understanding of the socioeconomic and scientific requirements of a grand challenge. Their potential lies in linking deliberative systems that otherwise operate in separate spaces, each with its own evaluative criteria and attention structures. By creating bridges—or opening windows between systems—scholars can reconfigure how issues, evaluations and responsibilities circulate.
To illustrate, consider the response to the Deepwater Horizon disaster in 2010. Investigators and consultants proposed pooling certain risk-management processes across oil companies. The idea did not dictate specific outcomes. Instead, it altered how firms compared risks and learned from one another. Even when diluted and patchily implemented, such changes demonstrate how targeted interventions can redirect collective behavior by reshaping how decisions connect.
Scholars who propose such ideas inevitably blur the line between observer and participant. The moment they publish, speak or advise, they become part of the systems they analyze and envision. This is not a failure of scientific distance; it is a condition for impact to occur.
Only by engaging from within can scholars influence how organizations, markets, networks, and institutions represent problems, weigh values, and justify action. Scholars contribute not by issuing commands but by reframing problems, introducing new evaluative tools, and making desirable connections visible. Their comparative advantage lies in understanding how attention is structured, how values collide, and how organizational techniques shape outcomes. Working on grand challenges does not require abandoning theory or adopting the role of technocratic problem-solver. It requires recognizing—and productively inhabiting—an entrepreneurial position within deliberative systems, combining observation and participation.
Why this matters beyond academia
This way of thinking has implications far beyond organization and management research. For practitioners—managers, policymakers, and advocates—it highlights the inescapable mix of moral judgment and practical reasoning in complex decisions. It clarifies how top-down orchestration interacts—and often conflicts—with bottom-up action, and how coordination crosses the seams between organizations.
Moreover, it suggests a different model of engagement with experts. Scholars need not be only detached arbiters or mere technicians. They can be seen as “entrepreneurial observers”: actors who help redesign the processes and structures through which societies connect, learn, and deliberate. Embracing this role may help societies produce better results.
