From competence to response-ability: Using AI simulations to practise responsible management
One of the central questions facing business educators today is how we prepare students not only to understand responsible management, but to practise it. While sustainability, ethics and stakeholder management are increasingly embedded within business curricula, developing the judgement required to navigate real-world complexity remains a significant challenge.
As organisations confront interconnected social, environmental and economic pressures, graduates need more than technical knowledge. They require the ability to engage with uncertainty, balance competing stakeholder interests and make thoughtful, responsible decisions in situations where there may be no single correct answer. These capabilities sit at the heart of both graduate employability and the Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME) mission to develop future leaders who create sustainable value for business and society.
In this blog, Dr David Evans from Manchester Metropolitan University explores how AI-enabled simulations can create new opportunities for students to develop what researchers describe as "response-ability" - the capacity to respond thoughtfully and effectively to complex organisational challenges. Drawing on the development and implementation of an innovative AI-supported learning environment, he reflects on how emerging technologies can be used not simply to teach about AI, but to create authentic spaces where students can rehearse responsible management in practice.
Dr David Evans is a Senior Lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University. His work focuses on responsible management education, employability and the development of innovative pedagogical approaches that help students prepare for the complexities of contemporary organisational life.
Introduction
By: Dr David Evans
Employers increasingly seek graduates who can do more than apply technical knowledge. They need individuals who can work collaboratively, navigate ambiguity, balance competing stakeholder interests and make sound decisions in uncertain environments. These capabilities sit at the intersection of employability and responsible management. Responsible management emphasises the ability to balance economic, social and environmental considerations while responding to the needs of multiple stakeholders.
For Higher Education Institutions, this creates an important challenge. While business schools have traditionally excelled at helping students develop knowledge and analytical skills, preparing students to exercise judgement in complex organisational settings is less straightforward. Students may understand management theories and frameworks, but translating those ideas into effective action in practice is often far more challenging.
This raises an important pedagogical challenge: while students may learn the principles of management, how can they develop the capability to enact them when faced with the uncertainty of real-world decision-making? Equally, how can we support business education to be underpinned by responsible management?
Responsible management is often required precisely when there is no obvious "right" answer and when the interests of different stakeholders are in tension. Students may understand the theory, but developing the judgement needed to navigate these situations is considerably more challenging.
From this perspective, employability is not simply about securing employment, but about preparing graduates to contribute responsibly within organisations and society. The challenge for business educators, however, is how to develop these capabilities in meaningful and authentic ways.
Response-ability
One framework that helped me think about this challenge is the Responsible Management Competence Framework developed by Laasch, Moosmayer and Antonacopoulou (2022). The framework argues that responsible management involves far more than the acquisition of knowledge or technical skills. Instead, responsible managers must develop the capacity to act, interact, reflect and adapt within complex and evolving situations.
Central to this perspective is the concept of response-ability: the ability to recognise and respond thoughtfully to the ethical, social, environmental and organisational challenges that emerge in practice. From this perspective, responsible management competence is not something students simply possess, but something that is continually developed through engagement with real-world situations and stakeholders.
I frequently observed students successfully discussing responsible management concepts in class yet had fewer opportunities to witness how they might respond when confronted with competing pressures and stakeholder perspectives. If responsible management competence is developed through action, interaction and reflection, then the pedagogical challenge becomes clear: how do we create meaningful opportunities for students to practise these capabilities before entering professional roles?
How can we create opportunities for practice?
My experience includes apprenticeship delivery and traditional undergraduate degree programmes, and in both contexts, there is a need to provide realistic opportunities to learn, apply and reflect on skills covered within the classroom. Even apprentices working in organisations, still need a safe space in which to apply their learning.
Lectures and seminars are effective for introducing and discussing theory, while case studies help students apply concepts. However, these activities often provide predetermined pathways and limited exposure to uncertainty.
Simulations are increasingly used as a valuable pedagogical tool to help support structured decision-making and problem solving. These tools enable students to engage with realistic scenarios and are particularly valuable for those with limited workplace experience. Simulations improve on traditional case studies because they require decisions to be made in real time and can generate different outcomes. However, they remain bounded environments, designed by educators, where the range of possible events and stakeholder responses is largely predefined.
This brings us back to the core challenge: responsible management is relational and dynamic. Students need opportunities to interact, negotiate, adapt, reflect, and respond. So, how can educators create realistic experiences without exposing students to the risks associated with real-world managerial decisions? Developing these capabilities is not only central to responsible management education; it is increasingly fundamental to graduate employability in organisations facing dynamic social, environmental and economic challenges.
Designing an AI-Enabled Learning Environment
The Department of Strategy, Enterprise and Sustainability at Manchester Metropolitan University funded the development of a bespoke simulation game that used emerging AI-enabled role-play technology to enhance the interactivity of the simulation. The simulation was framed through a broad lens of sustainability – but with the intention that the simulation could be deployed across several management education programmes and educational levels.
We developed an AI-enabled simulation with industry partners (HFX) and students, iteratively refining both scenarios and interactions before deploying it with a cohort of apprentices. The underpinning pedagogical approach included constructivist learning and cognitive flexibility theory – in short creating a simulation that:
generates ambiguity;
surfaces competing stakeholder interests;
encourages dialogue;
forces decision-making.
It requires both students and facilitators to sit with the messiness of real-world decision-making.
The AI-enabled element was key because it enabled responsive interactions, evolving conversations and realistic stakeholder engagement. Importantly, the simulation could respond to the tone/depth and type of response provided by the user – creating a different experience each time. The objective was not to teach students about AI. Rather, it was to use AI to create a more responsive environment in which responsible management could be practised.
Practising Response-Ability in Action
Across two scenarios, students engage with stakeholders holding contrasting perspectives on sustainability and responsible management. In the first, they must prepare for and navigate a conversation with a sceptical CEO; in the second, they work with a supplier whose practices are legally compliant but fall short of broader responsible management expectations. Rather than searching for a single correct answer, students must gather information, weigh competing interests, and decide how best to influence others.
Throughout the simulation, students encounter decision points characterised by stakeholder tensions, sustainability dilemmas, competing organisational priorities and incomplete information. The AI-enabled environment responds dynamically to their inputs, meaning conversations can develop in different directions and outcomes are not predetermined. As a result, students must continually interpret, adapt and respond to emerging situations, much as they would in organisational practice. In doing so, they move beyond understanding responsible management concepts and begin to practise the response-ability required to apply them.
What is interesting is that students often want educators to identify right and wrong answers, whereas we play with ambiguity. Instead, students found multiple defensible perspectives. This ambiguity was further compounded by stakeholder complexity, whereby students discovered that decisions benefiting one stakeholder group could create challenges for another. This uncertainty requires students to alter their approaches as new information emerges – this is developing their ability to be response-able. Students were not selecting answers from a menu. They were engaging in an unfolding situation that required interpretation, judgement and response.
Student feedback consistently highlighted the realism of stakeholder interactions and the absence of clear-cut answers as valuable aspects of the learning experience. One of the most valuable outcomes was students' willingness to challenge their own assumptions. The unexpected AI responses created valuable learning opportunities and greater levels of disagreement within groups create productive tension, as academics, we can then explore.
From the simulation, students also received immediate, tailored feedback based on the decisions they made; and importantly they were developing work‑based skills—communication, persuasion, problem-solving—alongside sustainability knowledge. From an academic perspective, we saw students engaging deeply and critically because they are inside the problem, not looking at it from the outside. In doing so, students begin to develop not only responsible management competence, but also many of the judgement, communication and stakeholder management skills associated with graduate employability.
What I learned as an educator
AI-enabled simulations create opportunities for students to rehearse response-ability in ways that are difficult to replicate through more traditional approaches. The simulation is engaging and creates energy within the classroom and drives a richer discussion within and across the group. Furthermore, it provides a clearer and stronger link between the practice applied by the students and theory underpinning their approach and supporting feedback.
Despite the value of the simulation, the AI is imperfect and can create entirely unexpected scenarios, for which the facilitator needs to be ready to respond. The AI characters are incredibly realistic and lifelike, but their parameters have been designed specifically for the game – therefore, there is always a level of simplification or framing to the scenarios. This is important to ensure the games are playable.
The key reflection from this experience is that AI does not replace the educator; effective facilitation remains essential, and arguably becomes even more important. The facilitator needs to be able to react to any prevailing situation the students create – and this lack of linearity in the learning – whilst representative of the real-world can be challenging to teach.
As with any technology, and AI especially, the technology itself is not the innovation. The innovation is creating a space where students can rehearse responsible management. AI may support capability development, but only when grounded in thoughtful pedagogical design.
Conclusion: Creating Spaces for Response-Ability
This blog has shared one example of how AI-enabled simulations can help connect responsible management and business education. More broadly, it raises an important question for educators: where do students currently have opportunities to practise responsible management within the curriculum? And how often are they required to navigate genuine ambiguity, competing stakeholder interests and uncertain outcomes, rather than predetermined answers?
The value of AI may lie less in providing answers and more in creating opportunities for responsible practice. Responsible management competence cannot be reduced to knowledge acquisition alone; it develops through judgement, interaction, reflection and response. Students need opportunities to rehearse these capabilities before they encounter them in professional practice.
As business schools continue to explore the implications of artificial intelligence, perhaps the most important question is not what AI can do for students, but what it can enable students to do. The real contribution of AI may not be automation, but its ability to help create learning environments where students can practise the judgement, adaptability and stakeholder engagement that responsible management demands. In doing so, we move closer to developing graduates who are not only employable, but response-able.
Reference
Laasch, O., Moosmayer, D.C. & Antonacopoulou, E.P. The Interdisciplinary Responsible Management Competence Framework: An Integrative Review of Ethics, Responsibility, and Sustainability Competences. J Bus Ethics 187, 733–757 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-022-05261-4
