ROOT-to-FRUIT | Dr. Khulan van Twist

The Framework

The ROOT-to-FRUIT Model

Named horticulturally to honour the slow, layered, seasonal character of leadership development the data revealed. Translation cycles in the data ranged from approximately 18 months to 8 years. Evaluation under a few months measures the wrong variable.

Why eight stages?

Each stage emerged as a distinct process across multiple research cases. Combining them would reduce explanatory precision, because leaders described each stage differently in practice.

Reflect concerns recognising that disruption or misalignment exists. Observe concerns sustained attentiveness to patterns over time. Orient locates the leader within broader systemic conditions. Translate converts that understanding into a provisional course of action. Refine is about experimentation. Unite is the move from individual to collective. Integrate embeds learning into structure. Track measures across seasons.

The model has no "refreeze" stage. Kurt Lewin's model assumes stability eventually returns. The leaders in this study described disruption as ongoing. ROOT-to-FRUIT is therefore cyclical, not linear, because that is what the data show.

The name: where is the F?

Reflect

Orient

Observe

Translate

Refine

Unite

Integrate

Track

There is no F. ROOT-to-FRUIT functions as a metaphor for the full developmental arc, not a strict letter-by-letter acronym. The eight verbs together cultivate the "fruit" of visible leadership practice. The horticultural image was chosen deliberately: meaningful growth is slow, seasonal, and nurtured from below the surface as much as above it.

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Temporal

Development measured in seasons, not programme cycles. Meaningful change takes 18 months to 8 years, not weeks.

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Bidirectional

Inner work (root) enables outer practice (fruit). Outer practice feeds back into inner work. Neither sustains without the other.

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Context-Sensitive

Cultural repertoire, relational trust, and structural conditions are active variables that shape the cycle, not background noise.

Root Work: Below the Soil

ReflectPause under disruption and ask what is actually happening. Interior, slow, sustained. The work that turns a disorienting dilemma into a developmental resource rather than only a problem to solve.

OrientLocate yourself within the broader systems you inhabit. Polycrisis-aware sensemaking. Name the conditions you can influence and those you must accept and adapt to.

ObserveWatch your own patterns under pressure, the organisation's patterns, and wider systemic signals. Without this, reflection becomes rumination and orientation becomes abstraction.

TranslateConvert what you have reflected, oriented, and observed into a working hypothesis about what to do next. The bridge between root and fruit.

Fruit Work: Above the Soil

RefineTest the hypothesis in low-stakes settings: conversations, pilot decisions, small experiments. Refine across iterations rather than expecting a single test to be conclusive.

UniteBring others into the working hypothesis. Move from "I" to "we" intentionally. This requires psychological safety and is the primary work of translating individual insight into collective action.

IntegrateEmbed the refined hypothesis into structural decisions: hiring, capital allocation, partnership choices, governance. The move from "we" to systems change.

TrackMeasure outcomes across seasons, not just quarters. Include qualitative trust and well-being data alongside quantitative metrics. Return to Reflect when new disorientation surfaces.

"The cycle is not linear. Leaders return to Reflect when Track surfaces new disorientation. They return to Observe when Unite encounters resistance. ROOT-to-FRUIT is a cycle of cycles, layered like the soil it borrows its metaphor from."

How ROOT-to-FRUIT differs from existing frameworks

vs. Kotter's 8-Step Model

Reflection before urgency

Kotter begins with creating urgency. ROOT-to-FRUIT begins with Reflect. The movement inward precedes and conditions the movement outward. There is no defined end-state, only a deepening orientation.

vs. Lewin's Unfreeze-Refreeze

No refreeze

Lewin assumes stability eventually returns. The leaders in this study described disruption as ongoing. Polycrisis means stability is temporary. ROOT-to-FRUIT is cyclical because that is what the data show.

vs. Competency Lists and IDG

Temporal and relational

Most frameworks treat development as a snapshot or checklist. ROOT-to-FRUIT treats it as a multi-season process in which context, culture, and relationship are active variables, not conditions to control for.

About the Researcher

Who is behind
this research?

↗ bookkhulan.com ↗ LinkedIn ↗ khulan.vantwist@gmail.com

Dr. Khulan van Eck Duymaer van Twist

Academic-Practitioner · Impact-Driven Leader

Dr. Khulan van Twist is an impact-driven sustainability leader, practitioner, and systems thinker. Rooted in Mongolia 🇲🇳, shaped in Singapore 🇸🇬, and based in Switzerland 🇨🇭. She holds an Executive Doctor of Business Administration from the Swiss School of Business and Management Geneva, where this research earned a distinction.

She works at the intersection of responsible leadership and systems change. During her research she held the following roles: Founder and President of Our Impact Mongolia; Impact Analyst for Responsible Leadership at Caux Initiatives of Change; and board and advisory roles at the Educators' Lab, Eiger Institute, and Peregrine Global Services. She has spoken internationally on climate leadership, regenerative systems, and purpose-driven organisations, and has collaborated with organisations including UNDP, The Climate Reality Project, and Swiss Youth for Climate, among others.

With a background spanning Computer Engineering and an Executive Doctorate in Strategic Management, she brings both analytical rigour and on-the-ground practice to her work. She completed this doctoral research in June 2026 while expecting her first child, a fact she names openly as part of what shaped both the urgency and the care she brought to this inquiry.

Researcher positionality, biases, and limitations

This research is openly interpretive rather than value-neutral. Dr. van Twist is not a detached observer. She is an active practitioner within sustainability, leadership, and systems-change communities, which shaped which questions she found urgent, which participants she could access, and how she interpreted what they said.

This positionality is treated as a resource rather than a flaw. It enabled high trust, deep access, and rich disclosure from participants. But it also carries risks the research acknowledges directly:

Self-selection bias

Many participants already valued reflection, leadership development, and personal growth. Leaders who are less interested in inner work are underrepresented. The findings likely overstate the prevalence of reflective practice among SME leaders in general.

Geographic concentration

Fifteen of nineteen participants are based in Switzerland. The findings reflect a specific institutional, regulatory, and cultural context. The cross-cultural observations from Mongolia, Belgium, and France are suggestive rather than conclusive.

Sample size and scope

Nineteen participants is appropriate for theory-generating qualitative research, but insufficient for statistical generalisation. The ROOT-to-FRUIT Model is an invitation to further investigation, not a definitive map of how all leaders develop.

Interpretive design

All themes were developed through the researcher's own inductive coding process, without inter-rater reliability testing. This is consistent with Braun and Clarke's reflexive thematic analysis, but means the findings reflect one rigorous interpretation, not an objective consensus.

The Research Problem

A gap the literature
had not yet filled

We increasingly live in what scholars describe as polycrisis and metacrisis: a condition where climate disruption, geopolitical instability, AI transformation, economic uncertainty, and social fragmentation interact simultaneously. Traditional leadership theories were largely developed for more stable environments.

A review of over 100 publications identified four gaps that this research was designed to address:

Gap 1

Responsible leadership and resilience are largely studied as separate constructs. In the lived experience of leaders, they collapse into one.

Gap 2

Most studies focus on large organisations. SMEs, which represent the majority of the business landscape, remain deeply underrepresented in the literature.

Gap 3

Most research relies on surveys. We know what leaders say about values. We know far less about how they actually decide when conditions become difficult.

Gap 4: Central

The literature explains what leaders value and what leadership behaviours exist, but not how leadership values become responsible decisions. This is the Translation Gap.

"When polycrisis is the operating environment and not the exception, how do leaders translate values into decisions?"

The research addressed this through four questions:

1How do business leaders define responsible and resilient leadership in their roles today?
2How do they translate those values into actual decisions under polycrisis conditions?
3What development pathways shape responsible-resilient capacity over time?
4How do cultural and structural conditions enable or block translation?

Read the full research: ↓ Executive Summary ↓ Full Thesis

Theoretical Foundations

Built on eight interconnected
domains of scholarship

ROOT-to-FRUIT does not emerge from a single theory. It is grounded in a deliberately broad literature review spanning eight domains, selected because the lived experience of leaders under polycrisis conditions cannot be explained by any one of them alone. The model draws on, responds to, and extends each of these fields.

Domain 1

Responsible Leadership Theory

Maak and Pless (2006) provide the ethical foundation: leaders as weavers of stakeholder relationships. ROOT-to-FRUIT extends this by asking how responsibility is enacted under disruption, not only in stable conditions.

Domain 2

Organisational Resilience

Drawing on Weick and Sutcliffe (2007) and Coutu (2002), resilience is reframed not as bouncing back but as iterative standing-up. Each cycle of disruption processed reflectively yields enlarged, not merely restored, capacity.

Domain 3

Regenerative and Systems-Change Leadership

Beyond sustainability toward regeneration (Hutchins and Storm, 2019). The model incorporates Meadows' leverage points and Scharmer's Theory U to address how leaders can act at a systems level, not just an organisational one.

Domain 4

Polycrisis and Metacrisis

Tooze (2022) on polycrisis; Rowson (2021) on metacrisis. The argument: existing leadership frameworks were designed for disruption as an episode. ROOT-to-FRUIT is designed for disruption as a condition.

Domain 5

Theory of Change and Translation

Mezirow's (1997) transformative learning and Argyris's double-loop learning (1977) explain the internal mechanism. The Translation Gap identified in this study is the mechanism these theories describe but do not fully operationalise.

Domain 6

Leadership Development Pathways

Kegan and Lahey (2009) on adult development; Day et al. (2014) on leader development. ROOT-to-FRUIT adds a third dimension to formal and informal pathways: inner development, named by the Inner Development Goals framework (IDG Foundation, 2021).

Domain 7

Decision-Making Under Disruption

Kahneman (2011) on fast and slow thinking; Snowden and Boone\'s Cynefin framework (2007) for navigating complexity. Leaders consistently described moving between these registers, which informed the Observe and Translate stages.

Domain 8

Cross-Cultural Leadership

Rather than confirming Hofstede's fixed cultural profiles (1980), the data showed something more fluid: leaders draw from multiple cultural repertoires depending on context. Culture functions as vocabulary, not identity.

Original Contributions

Five things this research
adds to existing knowledge

The thesis makes five distinct contributions, each addressing a gap in the literature and each carrying practical implications for leaders, programme designers, and policy actors.

The central contribution

The Translation Gap: existing literature explains what leaders value and what behaviours exist, but not the mechanism by which values become decisions under pressure. This study maps that mechanism for the first time through the lived experience of nineteen leaders.

Responsible-Resilient Leadership

A new integrated construct: the capacity to make values-guided decisions that maintain stakeholder trust while enabling organisational adaptation during systemic disruption. Responsible leadership provides ethical direction. Resilience provides adaptive capacity. In practice under polycrisis, they are inseparable.

The Formal-Informal-Inner Triangle

Existing leadership development models address formal programmes and some address informal networks. This study identifies a consistent third dimension: inner development through reflection, meaning-making, self-awareness, and embodiment. Single-tier development plateaus.

Cultural Repertoire Theory

Where Hofstede treats culture as a relatively fixed identity, this study found leaders actively selecting from multiple cultural formations depending on context. Culture functions as a repertoire of available practices, not a profile.

Disruption Reveals, Not Always Creates

For developmentally mature organisations, disruption did not create resilience. It revealed resilience already embedded through prior preparation. Crisis was not always the catalyst. Sometimes it was the test.

Research Findings

What nineteen leaders revealed
about leading through polycrisis

Six primary themes and five emergent themes arose from the data. They were not pre-hypothesised. The study began with open curiosity and nineteen leaders doing the talking.

Responsibility is concentric

Leaders describe obligation as nested rings running from self through family, employees, customers, community, and planet. The radius is not fixed; it is set by each leader's formation, context, and accumulated trust capital.

Resilience is iterative standing-up

Not the spring that returns to shape, but the plant bent by wind that grows stronger at a new angle. Each disruption processed reflectively yields enlarged, not merely restored, capacity.

Disruption accelerates the prepared

Well-prepared organisations experience disruption as confirmation of prior strategy, not catalyst for change. This complicates the standard disruption-as-opportunity narrative in both academic and consulting contexts.

Informal networks are the real path

Formal programmes trigger and provide shared vocabulary. Sustained developmental momentum happens through peer networks, mentors, and alumni cohorts across years, not within a single programme cycle.

Culture is a repertoire, not a profile

Leaders draw selectively from Swiss, Mongolian, French, Belgian, Indian, and German formations rather than performing a single national style. Location does not fully determine cultural influence.

Relational trust is the medium of decisions

Trust capital compounds across decades and serves as a shock-absorber during disruption. Where trust is shallow, responsibility stays internal. Where trust extends across stakeholders, resilience extends with it.

Five emergent themes across cases

Inner Practice

Meditation, embodiment, journaling, silence, nature. Emerging baseline among the most resilient leaders.

Psychological Safety

The condition that allows inner practice to become collective rather than remaining private.

AI Adaptation

How leaders frame AI (threat, tool, teammate, or ethical question) tracks closely with their broader resilience orientation.

Generational Tension

A strategic talent issue: younger workers demand visible purpose; older leaders carry institutional pattern memory. Both are needed.

Stakeholder Co-creation

The operational form of moving from "I" to "we" to systems change. Not consultation; genuine co-authorship of direction.

Practical Value

What this means
for four audiences

Individual Leaders

The most resilient draw simultaneously on formal programmes, informal networks, and inner practice. Single-tier development plateaus. The self-assessment above helps you identify which tier and which stage needs attention this season.

Organisations

Making inner practice culturally available without imposing a single technique is the design challenge. Psychological safety is the precondition. Structure your leadership culture so that reflection is valued, not treated as a private eccentricity.

Development Providers

Evaluation horizons under six months measure the wrong variable. Seasonal indicators such as inner-practice continuity and relational network depth are leading indicators of structural change that follows, often 18 months or more later.

Policy Actors

Structural conditions such as governance design, incentive systems, and board composition shape the translation rate of leadership development. Policy that modifies these conditions directly affects how quickly responsible-resilient leadership scales.

From Reflectionto Action