Making sustainability tensions salient: changing information or people?

Sustainability issues are associated with numerous tensions. These tensions are sometimes being referred to as wicked or even paradoxical. As long as tensions stay latent for organizational members, they will not be perceived and, thus, will not be adequately managed. The question of how tensions become salient is therefore of particular interest. Prior research suggests that contextual and cognitive factors render latent tensions salient and argues that advanced cognition is required to recognize sustainability tensions. In this paper, we show that developing cognition is only one possible strategy. We argue that information links a situation with actors' cognition and is therefore vital for rendering latent sustainability tensions salient. We show that simplifying information and making information more complex are two additional ways to recognize sustainability tensions. The situation–information–cognition (SIC) rule we develop in this article shows when and under which conditions the three strategies apply interchangeably or in combination.