Back to the future… the hourglass of sustainability between personal and social orientations.

Social responsibility and sustainability represent a clear example of multi- and inter-disciplinary concepts based on the challenging interactions and on the changing perspectives of the multiple interested actors. Due to their features, systems thinking has been considered as one of the powerful interpretative lenses for depicting their dynamics and anticipating their evolution over the time. Unfortunately, the large parts of current studies in such a field are mainly interested in defining a holistic representation of social responsibility and sustainability unable to catch individual and subjective dimensions behind. With the aim to enrich current debates about the role of personal responsibility as a part of social responsibility and sustainability, the paper adopts the interpretative lens provided by the Viable Systems Approach for underlining how the three drivers of Intellectual Capital can be exploited for depicting a conceptual model built upon the Maslow’s Pyramid for connecting individual and collective orientation under a common purpose. Thanks to the provided conceptual model, researchers and practitioners have the opportunity for better understanding the role of interaction between personal and collective factors in depicting actual and (perhaps) future assets and strategies for sustainable development.