Int. J. Business Environment, Vol. 8, No. 1, 2016 19 Copyright © 2016 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd. The wicked challenge of the business environment John C. Camillus Katz Graduate School of Business, University of Pittsburgh, 338 Mervis Hall, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, USA Email: camillus@katz.pitt.edu Abstract: Today’s business environment has seen the emergence of ubiquitous and increasingly significant forces. Three such ‘mega-forces’ are the inevitability of globalisation, the imperative of innovation, and the importance of shared value. These forces are significant individually, but when they interact they generate powerful phenomena, namely, disruptive technologies, conflicted stakeholders and unknowable futures. The confluence of these phenomena gives rise to wicked problems. The mega-forces and the resulting wicked problems make traditional techniques of strategic analysis ineffective and require new approaches to strategy making. Recognising how the phenomena generated by the mega-forces give rise to wicked problems provides firms with guidelines for dealing with the distinctive and daunting challenge posed by these wicked problems. Keywords: business environment; business strategy; disruptive technologies; globalisation; innovation; shared value; stakeholders; wicked problems Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Camillus, J.C. (2016) ‘The wicked challenge of the business environment’, Int. J. Business Environment, Vol. 8, No. 1, pp.19–31. Biographical notes: John C. Camillus has held the Donald R. Beall Endowed Chair in Strategic Management at the Katz Graduate School of Business since 1992. He received his Doctoral degree in Business Administration from Harvard University, his Master’s in Management from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad and his Bachelor’s in Mechanical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. 1 Introduction There are developments in today’s business environment that pose unprecedented challenges to decision makers. These developments are contributing to an increase in strategic issues that are fundamentally different, and not readily addressed using conventional tools of strategy analysis and development. These emerging strategic issues often appear to be wicked problems. Wicked problems were identified by Rittel and Webber in their 1973 article in Policy Sciences. The impact of wicked problems on strategy development was discussed by Camillus in a 2008 Harvard Business Review article. The fundamental challenge facing managers is the uncertainty and complexity that characterise business environments. If uncertainty and complexity were not present there