Dr David Beech, an organisational psychologist and Lecturer in Salford Business School, recently presented his practical research on applying general selection theory to business decision-making for sustainability. His work proposes a socio-ecological framework to help managers understand how different types of decisions and processes can support long-term sustainability.
At the heart of this framework is the idea of a tetra bottom line, which expands on a traditional focus on profit to include four interrelated outcomes: quality of life for people, ecological stewardship of the planet, competitive productivity for profit, and pathfinder learning for progress. Together, these elements offer a way for organisations to balance economic success with social and environmental responsibility.
Presenting at a sustainability symposium
David presented his paper at the Symposium on Sustainability in Executive Business Education Programmes held at Salford Business School 4-5 December 2025. The event was co-hosted with Professor Walter Leal from Hamburg University of Applied Sciences, where he heads the Sustainable Development and Climate Change Management Research and Transfer Centre (FTZ NK).
The symposium brought together educators to explore how sustainability can be more effectively embedded within executive and business education.
A framework for decision-making and change
David’s paper proposes a significant revision of a classic organisation science model for corporate decision-making that is widely used to diagnose and implement organisational change. His proposed socio-ecological framework for decision-making for sustainability focuses on how different types of collective action in organisations emerge under different conditions.
In this framework subjective collective action preferences about goals, means, and outcomes vary from more agreement to more disagreement, while objective knowledge about goals, means, and outcomes connections vary from more certainty to more uncertainty. The resulting outcomes of motivated goal preferences, strategies, and practical actions for change are organised into a matrix of ideal type approaches to corporate decision-making and change.
Implications for executive education
David highlights how, in executive education and in Executive MBA programmes, managers can learn about when and how to apply different approaches to implementing change.
These include rational planning and technical pro-order initiatives within administrative hierarchies, which exploit adjustments to established routines to ensure continuity in effective performance. He also describes consensual judgement and pro-social initiatives within self-governing or self-managing structures, which support changes in attitudes and behaviours for cooperative performance improvement outcomes.
The decision framework also draws attention to more directive, pro-self change initiatives in elite bargaining structures with competitive outcomes, as well as more ‘wicked’ trial and error pro-autonomy initiatives in pathfinder project structures, where exploratory and experimental variation is required.
David emphasises that effective change initiatives often involve mixtures of these four ideal type approaches, rather than relying on a single approach to decision-making or change.
General selection theory and the Sustainable Development Goals
Further, David proposes how general selection theory can be applied to the constant competitive and cooperative interaction of individuals and groups within and between organisations. He argues that these interactions generate constantly evolving continuity, variation, and change.
Drawing on Darwin’s concept of a competitive struggle for life, David describes how cooperative multiplication generates variation, and how the ‘strongest’ variations are selected to survive. Variations in organisational practices that are better adapted to their current situation are more likely to continue to exist and to be transmitted, reproduced, or inherited over time. This process is general selection theory: variation, transmission or inheritance, and selection.
Thirdly, David applies his proposed socio-ecological framework for corporate decision-making for sustainability to the seventeen sustainable development goals (SDG’s). He suggests that fifteen of the goals relate mainly to ecological stewardship for the planet and to quality of life for people.
His initial analysis indicates that only parts of SDG 8 relate to competitive productivity for profit and only SDG 4 relates to pathfinder learning for progress; recognising that progress may not be for the better.
David suggests that the SDG’s, an output from rational planning and consensual judgement approaches to change by experts to promote ecological stewardship and quality of life neglect sustainability requirements for competitive productivity and innovative variation and pathfinder learning. He suggests, such well-intentioned, but prescriptive and paternalistic commitments to social and planetary justice are understandably resisted by citizens and populist leaders, from both left and right.
Looking ahead
David concludes by suggesting that more attention to all four types of change situation and associated goal preferences, strategies, and outcomes by business schools in their educational practices would contribute to a tetra bottom line for sustainability that achieves and continuously renews evolving balances across quality of life for people, ecological stewardship for planet, competitive productivity for profit, and pathfinder learning for progress.
The conference provided David with networking opportunities to pave the way for potential international collaboration for a socio-ecological approach to the evolving challenges and opportunities of decision-making for sustainability in business education as part of a contribution to the University of Salford mission to innovate to enrich lives.