Despite management theorists' decades-long attention to the robust sustainability of complex organizations, adaptive management practices remain undertheorized. Management is evolving from a hierarchically organized effort in pursuit of strategically determined goals into a facilitation of layered, distributed, autonomous agents able to learn from their errors and ensure the entire system's long-term survivability. A rhetorical perspective on pedagogy allows us to better prepare our students for success in the 21st century's adaptive organization as well as contribute to theoretical scholarship of effective organizations.