Research & Frameworks
The Worldview LOA Framework
A rigorous academic foundation for understanding how executives perceive, interpret, and engage with organisational change — rooted in decades of research and practice.
The Foundation
A New Lens on Executive Transformation
The Worldview LOA Framework is a navigational instrument for executive judgement. Worldviews are generative evaluative structures comprising three co-constituted dimensions: Legitimacy beliefs (L), Moral Obligation (O), and Perceived Agency (A), activated in organizational judgment through a fourth dynamic element, Evaluative Reflexivity. It helps leaders understand how their underlying worldview shapes perception, judgement, engagement, and behaviour, enabling wiser decisions and more effective leadership in complex and changing environments.
Worldview mapping — understanding the foundational assumptions, beliefs, and mental models that shape how a leader perceives reality, interprets events, and assigns meaning to experience.
Orientation assessment — examining the directional stance a leader adopts toward change, challenge, and uncertainty. How they orient to the world directly shapes their capacity for adaptive leadership.
Activation and engagement — translating insight and orientation into intentional action. The activation construct bridges internal transformation with observable leadership behaviour and organisational impact.
The Diagnostic Instrument
The Executive Sextant
As the sextant guided mariners by measuring the angle between celestial bodies and the horizon, the Executive Sextant measures the angle between a leader's worldview and their actual engagement with reality. It is a six-stage diagnostic process yielding precise positional intelligence.
"Transformation begins not with changing the world, but with changing the way we see it."
— Dr. George Kesselaar
The executive attends to the data of their experience — what is actually present in their environment, relationships, and inner landscape — without interpretation or judgment.
A first-pass evaluation of observed phenomena through the executive's existing schema. This stage makes explicit the automatic assessments that typically operate below conscious awareness.
The critical diagnostic stage — examining the precise angle from which the executive views the situation. Small shifts in the angle of appraisal yield dramatically different interpretations and responses.
The considered verdict the executive reaches — an intentional evaluation that integrates observation, appraisal, and perspective-awareness into a coherent assessment of the situation at hand.
How the executive chooses to enter the situation — the quality, energy, and orientation of their relational and strategic engagement, shaped by the judgments formed in the preceding stages.
The visible manifestation of the full diagnostic cycle — the observable actions, decisions, and communications that flow from worldview through engagement, now grounded in intentional self-awareness.
The Change Journey
The Voyage of Executive Engagement
An eight-stage developmental arc that maps the complete trajectory of executive transformation — from initial encounter with change to embodied mastery and the capacity to guide others.
First contact with the imperative for change — the moment an executive recognises that current modes of leading are no longer sufficient for the challenges ahead.
The natural protective response of the existing worldview — the internal and external forces that resist disruption, and the intelligence contained within this resistance.
Genuine questioning of assumptions and inherited mental models. The executive begins to hold their worldview as an object of study rather than as the invisible lens through which they see.
The productive unsettling that accompanies deep inquiry. Old certainties dissolve before new frameworks solidify — a necessary and often uncomfortable passage in genuine transformation.
The emergence of a revised worldview — new frameworks for understanding self, others, and organisational dynamics that are more expansive, more accurate, and more adaptive.
Weaving the new worldview into the fabric of daily leadership practice. The executive begins to act from the new orientation across multiple domains of their professional life.
The new orientation becomes the executive's natural way of being — no longer effortful or deliberate, but expressed fluently and authentically in their leadership presence and decisions.
The fully transformed executive becomes a generative force — capable of creating conditions in which others can undergo their own voyages of engagement and transformation.
Academic Work
Selected Publications & Research
A selection of peer-reviewed contributions to the fields of executive development, organisational change, and leadership epistemology.
This paper introduces the Worldview LOA Framework as a comprehensive theoretical model for understanding the relationship between an executive's foundational assumptions and their capacity for adaptive leadership in conditions of uncertainty and complex change.
An empirical investigation into how senior leaders' angles of appraisal — the vantage point from which they evaluate organisational situations — systematically influence strategic decision quality, team engagement, and change outcomes.
Drawing on in-depth phenomenological interviews with 34 senior executives across four continents, this study maps the subjective experience of transformative change in leadership identity, revealing eight distinct developmental stages of the executive voyage.
A critical examination of dominant behaviour-change models in executive coaching, proposing an epistemological approach that targets the worldview structures underlying observable behaviour as the more fundamental and durable site of intervention.