From Reflection to Action: How Business Leaders in Switzerland Translate Values into Decisions Under Systemic Disruption – Development of the Root-to-Fruit Model

Abstract

This thesis investigates how business leaders, especially of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) navigate responsible and resilient decision-making in conditions of polycrisis, the contemporary state in which interconnected ecological, economic, geopolitical, technological, and social shocks compound across systems and time.
The investigation consists of carefully reviewing over eighty different credible sources of literature publications which form eight interconnected theoretical domains, coupled by listening directly and actively to nineteen leaders who run, build, and steward businesses in conditions of compounding uncertainty.
This study presents a multimodal qualitative design involving the primary contribution of 19 business leaders. 10 of which, took part in the semi-structured interviews of 35 to 60 minutes (average 45 minutes). While 9 of which, following initial discussions, preferred to provide their responses through written Google Forms designed to closely mirror the interview structure and questions. Additionally, a public portfolio of supporting documents and field observations across leaders working in Switzerland (15), Mongolia (2), Belgium (1), and France (1). The sample comprises 5 leaders of large enterprises, 5 of medium-sized companies, and 9 of small firms. For confidentiality reasons, participants and their organisations are anonymised in the published work as P1 through P19 and Company A through Company S.
Methodology and transparency: the explorative study began with no prior hypothesis. Leaders were invited to speak in their own language freely about responsibility, resilience, the disruptions they had recently navigated, the development pathways they had used, and the cultural sources from which they drew. Form responses, websites, governance documents, and publicly available material from each respondent’s organisation were used as triangulating evidence. The use of artificial intelligence is treated as a methodological choice to be declared rather than a convenience to be concealed, consistent with the transparency norms increasingly expected in qualitative research conducted in the mid-2020s.
Audio recordings were transcribed using Otter.ai. All sources identified or verified to better understand existing research gaps through Perplexity.ai were subsequently confirmed against the original source prior to inclusion. No citation was retained solely on the basis of AI-generated output. All writing and final theme refinement was performed by hand on a word document against the verbatim record. Six primary themes emerged: responsibility as concentric obligation, resilience as iterative standing-up, disruption as leadership accelerator, informal networks as development pathways, culturally encoded leadership logics, and relational trust as decision infrastructure. Five emergent themes operate across cases: inner practice and embodiment, psychological safety, AI and technological adaptation, generational tension, and stakeholder co-creation. The most frequent informant pattern is that formal leadership programmes function as catalysts and shared vocabulary, while sustained development happens in informal relational and cultural settings. Inner practice, although rarely institutionalised, appears as an emerging baseline expectation among leaders who report higher resilience. A further cross-cutting finding is that disruption does not universally function as a catalyst for transformation: for more developmentally mature organisations, disruption often operates instead as confirmation of already-embedded resilient capacities and values. This study proposes “responsible-resilient leadership” as an extended construct of existing responsible leadership and resilient leadership frameworks by integrating ethical stewardship with adaptive capacity under sustained systemic disruption. The integrated construct, responsible-resilient leadership, is therefore defined in this study as the capacity to make values-guided decisions that maintain stakeholder trust and enable organisational adaptation during conditions of polycrisis, drawing on relational resources, cultural formation, developmental experiences, and sustained inner practice.
The discussion proposes a new conceptual contribution, the ROOT-to-FRUIT Model. ROOT-to-FRUIT is a slow-cycle, horticultural model in which leaders Reflect, Orient, Observe, Translate, Refine, Unite, Integrate, and Track, treating meaningful change as seasonal rather than daily or weekly and acknowledge that responsible-resilient leadership matures over seasons rather than days. The term “ROOT-to-FRUIT” functions as a metaphor for the full developmental arc rather than as a strict letter-by-letter acronym, with the eight verbs together cultivating the “fruit” of visible leadership practice. A companion self-assessment tool and an example is presented in Appendix.
Implications are theoretical, practical, and professional. Theoretically, the study contributes to a polycrisis-aware integration of responsible leadership and resilience scholarship, anchored in the Inner Development Goals tradition, in particular the De Gruyter volumes edited by Egel and Campos Suarez (2025). Practically, the ROOT-to-FRUIT Model and assessment tool are offered as instruments for leaders, programme designers, and policy actors. Professionally, the study positions the leader’s inner work as a public good rather than a private hobby in a polycrisis era.
Keywords leadership, resilient leadership, polycrisis, values-based decision-making, SME leadership, ROOT-to-FRUIT Model, inner practice, leadership development.