Organizations play a crucial role in addressing grand challenges; however, they often grapple with the complexities that arise from their gradual development, constant evolution and involvement of multiple stakeholders. We suggest that a shift from structural to adaptive processual approaches is important. We propose a model of organizational learning for addressing grand challenges that highlights attention and routinization as key mechanisms. In our model, the structured interaction of these two elements enables organizations to effectively learn from salient events, improve responses and develop the capacity to anticipate and proactively tackle similar challenges in the future. Our model is drawn from a historical case study of the Unicode Consortium-an international standards body responsible for the encoding and maintenance of emojis. The organization learned from a series of crises as it sought to address the grand challenge of social justice through more diverse and inclusive representation in emojis. We contend that attention was pivotal in enabling a focus on key evolving issues of diversity and inclusion, while routinization acted as a supportive structure for enhancing efficiency and responsiveness in a continuously evolving landscape.
