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Rethinking our organisational learning processes is critical to society's transition to sustainability – a transition toward living respectfully with one another on a planet with finite resources. Presents the concept of sustainability as a central organising focus for higher education and draws on theories of organisational learning to help inform the transition. Specifically, the central case study focuses on the University of British Columbia (UBC), Canada's first university to adopt a sustainable development policy, and explores how well the policy is implemented in practice. Explores some of the barriers to effective implementation, and provides insights into why the University operates as a “knowledge institution” rather than a “learning institution”. An embedded case study examines the learning experience of the Faculty of Agricultural Sciences at UBC based on the recent transformation of its core curriculum to incorporate sustainability principles.

The purpose of this paper is to capture, codify and communicate an implicit change‐management process to embed corporate responsibility and sustainability at the Cranfield School of Management.

To explain the (on‐going) change‐management process, the authors retrospectively applied change‐management literature to the implicit process in which they have, themselves, been intimately involved.

The implicit change‐management process had unconsciously mobilized a variety of tactics identified in the change‐management literature; a more explicit articulation of the “as‐is” and “desired” states, and a more explicit, systematic and regular communication of the journey and goal, might have enabled faster progress. However, the nature of a highly autonomous and decentralized organization, such as an academic institution, means that sustainable change management may be slower than in commercial institutions.

The authors have been closely engaged in the change‐management process they describe and, inevitably, have unconscious biases and partial perspectives. Nevertheless, as a frank and self‐critical account of a five‐year‐plus process, it can assist other academic institutions.

As more business schools seek to embed corporate responsibility and sustainability, the case study identifies a series of potential change‐management tactics.

The paper applies a change‐management model to examine how one school of management is tackling how to embed corporate responsibility and sustainability into its research, teaching, advisory services and its own operations.