The opening of an adaptive space: Sense practices for implementing sustainability-oriented innovation strategy

Firms struggle to translate sustainability ambitions into innovation practices, especially in crisis contexts where leaders must navigate ambiguity, competing demands, and rapid change. This study examines how top managers use sense-related practices to cultivate an adaptive space for sustainability-oriented innovation (SOI) under crisis-induced conditions. Drawing on an in-depth, process-oriented case study of Plast, a Scandinavian plastic packaging firm responding to a business crisis amid the EU plastic ban, we investigate how such practices enable the emergence of an adaptive space as a socio-cognitive arena where novel ideas, practices, and solutions can take shape. Our findings show that leadership for crisis-induced SOI is enacted through situated interpretive and communicative practices that generate an adaptive space between formal organizational structures and emergent change dynamics. Top managers cultivate this space by framing urgency, using narratives and metaphors to reorient shared understandings, and sustaining collective engagement across the formulation, initiation, and implementation of SOI strategies. These practices enable novel ideas to be generated, negotiated, and integrated into organizational action. The study contributes to leadership research by offering an in-situ empirical account of how leaders enact sense-related practices in SOI contexts. It adds to complexity leadership theory by showing how an adaptive space is created through an intersubjective process of sense-related episodes, offering a processual and context-sensitive understanding of leadership in sustainability transitions. It also provides empirical insight into how language, framing, narratives, and collaborative meaning-making can support strategic change in response to sustainability challenges.