Letters to the future challenge: A scalable online tool to engage management students with the SDGs

The mission of the UN's Principles for Responsible Management Education is to transform management education and align it explicitly with achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Despite progress, critical goals, such as No Poverty and Zero Hunger, remain inadequately addressed. Our intervention introduces a pedagogical innovation designed to cultivate critical skills, including reflective thinking, strategic planning, and proactive agency, that can directly enable students (and citizens) to practice responsible management aligned with key SDGs. Through a novel, scalable, online writing activity called the “Letter to the Future Challenge” (LFC), grounded in principles of Positive Psychology (particularly engagement, meaning, and purpose), students: (a) critically reflect upon and articulate visions for an ideal future world contrasting these with the idea of the world that will come to pass if nothing changes, and (b) reflect upon and explicitly formulate achievable, measurable goals and actions addressing concrete SDG targets. By encouraging students to connect individual purpose to collective sustainability goals, LFC can be used as part of a pedagogical toolkit to teach students human agency, develop competencies necessary for sustainable management decisions, and promote behavioral commitments aligned with advancing specific SDGs.