A commitment to ethics, responsibility and sustainability (ERS) is easy to agree on in principle. It becomes messier when it meets with reality. The reality being, that on the ground, it often creates tension.

The current challenge with ERS initiatives in business schools is definitely not a lack of ideas. It is rather what happens when those ideas start to interfere with existing activities and institutional realities. A programme is redesigned, but disagreement remains on what should be taught.

A partnership is questioned because of its environmental impact, but it also funds other important work. A new initiative is launched, but it competes with limited time, budget, and workload. There are constantly multiple perspectives around costs, timelines, metrics, and priorities to be managed. And even good ideas can fail if they don’t immediately generate profit, challenge established definitions of success or if the people responsible for delivering, do not believe in them.

The reality is that ERS commitments force choices and compromises.

What brings the challenge even a level higher is that it is never a black-and-white situation where the choice is between something clearly right and something clearly wrong. More often, it is a choice between priorities where each is reasonable, each makes sense, and each has consequences. Frameworks and accreditation standards can help structure thinking, but they do not remove these tensions. Someone still has to decide.

It is where many current conversations fall short. We spend time defining sustainability, measuring and reporting. Less attention is given to how decisions are made when there is no clean solution.

There is also no single way forward. What works in one institution or region may not translate to another. The idea of a universal best practice simply does not exist

So perhaps the question is not how to implement ERS, but how to make sustainable decisions that make sense within our own context. Because context is not a limitation, it can be the guiding light. That means recognising socio-environmental realities, historical legacies, institutional culture, as well as available resources and the connected trade-offs, making them explicit, and being able to explain and stand behind the choices that follow.

This is not something that is easy to work out in isolation.

The EFMD workshop within the Responsible Management Education week, taking place on 30 June in Cairo, is designed as a space to explore these questions. It focuses on how business schools navigate tensions as they arise. Drawing on experiences across the EFMD network, it looks at how different institutions approach trade-offs in teaching, research, operations, and external engagement, not to replicate models, but to understand how decisions are made.

A central part of the work is a structured mapping exercise. Participants connect their own strategic priorities to the sustainability decisions they influence. This makes synergies visible, but also brings trade-offs into view. The point is not to eliminate these tensions. It is to recognise them, work with them, and be more deliberate about the choices that follow.

Because sustainability, in the end, is shaped less by what we intend to do but rather by the decisions we make when it becomes difficult.

For additional insights, announcements and perspectives, visit the conversation on Business Education.