As you may have noticed, since you’re reading this, provocative titles drive readership. Why? Because words matter, and people pay attention to words when those words don’t melt into the same ol’ same ol’ drone of technocratic chatter.

In our work, we constantly struggle to use language as a tool to communicate, rather than simply as an artifact to convey that work of some sort has happened. Often this means that we must struggle to define a grammar and vocabulary for our clients that is effective but not foreign. And, occasionally, we find that only once you’ve spent a significant amount of time and energy around a concept embodied in a particular word do you realize you no longer believe in the power of that word to express what is really going on. “Sustainability” is one such word.

Sustainability is used contemporaneously to describe an approach, primarily to the environment, but often to larger social issues, that emphasizes conservation, remediation, and prevention. It has been embraced primarily by companies seeking a way to respond to the growing social, political, and occasionally economic incentives to examine the effects business-as-usual have on the communities and ecosystems within which those companies are embedded.

Regardless of whether or not companies ought to be concerned with larger environmental or social issues, and I think it is unequivocally the case that they should, I’ve come to believe that we’ve been operating in the wrong frame. In fact, I think much of the current disagreement about what to do about climate change and global warming has less to do with fundamentals (although I don’t deny there continue to be seemingly unbridgeable gaps between parties), and much more with how we’ve constructed the dialogue, or if you prefer, the argument.

Here’s where we return to the importance of language. It can’t be about “sustainability”. Companies are, by their very nature, concerned about sustainability: they always have been. They are perhaps much more aware than many of their erstwhile detractors of the need to ensure that the resources they depend on continue to be available. Coke, or Nestle, or Unilever know very well the dangers of diminishing or unusable water supplies. It may be true, that for them it is not necessarily about quality of life for people living along rivers or over aquifers, but rather whether or not they can continue to profitably do what they do. The effect, however, is much the same.

Companies, markets, nations don’t succeed by simply sustaining. It’s the wrong word – it’s the wrong idea.

It is a challenging time on many fronts, and the language we use to describe those challenges and our responses to them will either create shared meaning and endeavor or misunderstanding and divisiveness. Instead of the misunderstood, misappropriated, and misused term of sustainability, perhaps instead we ought to focus on adaptability and resilience as our common touchstones.

Adaptability is a well-understood word, meaning to be able to adjust to new circumstances or conditions. It has been applied frequently to describe (among other things) American business’s approach to innovation, to changing market conditions, and to social pressures. The Internet, globalism, and the green movement are all perfectly good examples. Climate change and global warming represent another and new variable for businesses looking seriously at adapting for their future.

Unlike sustainability, which has mostly been about mitigation and cessation, adaptability suggests reinvention, innovation, new ways to accomplish new things. CEOs the world over know that their adaptability in the face of changing circumstances and an uncertain future will determine which companies are winners and which are losers.

Resilience, similarly, is the capacity to withstand and recover from difficult conditions, again something American business has demonstrated its ability to do time and time again. Changing environmental conditions and the attendant pressures such changes will place on the way companies do business, and on their customers, will require enormous resilience.

While sustainability downplays the power of resistance and recovery and submits both to unwavering external forces, resilience offers a way to accommodate, integrate, and then transform circumstances from possible – even probable – failure to success. Corporate leaders know the power of resilience, and – with some notable exceptions – have been building organizations that can respond quickly and successfully to external pressure.

Climate change and global warming will force companies to be both adaptable and resilient, perhaps on a scale – both temporally and economically – greater than ever before. Interestingly, adaptability and resilience are what we look for in ecosystems to determine if they are healthy. They serve as indicators of systems in balance. And unlike sustainability, both resilience and adaptability are open-ended and unconstrained. They don’t suggest anything other than successful evolution. Indeed, if companies were universally both resilient and adaptable, the world would be considerably better off than status quo.

Adaptability and resilience don’t offer, it is true, as pithy a term as sustainability. But, at the same time, they don’t obfuscate, don’t misdirect, and they do point towards what is truly needed. And, in these times, a little more subtly and a little more shared meaning, even at the cost of a couple of more words, is probably a good thing.