Local organising and sustainability? : it has to be fractal!

Organising for sustainability seeks systems change at a global level. This objective is captured in the phrase ‘Think global, act local’; an assumption is that global change will happen through summative local action. This paper argues that local action will not necessarily produce systems change and that a new categorisation for interacting with systems, a fractal, is needed to compliment conventional categorisations of local and global. The paper introduces the concept of fractal narrative as a useful tool for identifying fractals in organisational settings and argues that change for sustainability needs to be framed as a fractal narrative in order to facilitate implementation success