ROSE, BUD, THORN
HOW A FAMILY RITUAL BECAME A POWERFUL HIGH-PERFORMANCE TOOL
TLDR: We started using Rose, Thorn, Bud in our family each night. It is now one of the most consistent high-performance tools we use with leadership teams.
Rose is the past — what went well, who deserves recognition, what should become a standard. It demands Honesty.
Thorn is the present — what is hard right now, what is unresolved, where the team needs to be honest with itself. It demands Humility.
Bud is the future — one specific commitment, named publicly, with the team as witness. It demands Hard Work.
If you want to fine-tune your team’s stand-up meetings, your 1on1s or even your nightly reflection this model is simple, effective and powerful
Every night our rather large family gathers together after dinner and, prior to our evening prayers, shares a ritual that has become one of the most powerful high-performance tools I have used in teams, one-on-one coaching, and cross-department alignment.
We call it Rose, Thorn, Bud.
Each person shares at least one thing on each of three easy-to-remember themes.
☰ A Rose — an achievement, something worth celebrating, something to be grateful for; importantly, a behaviour or effort worth recognising.
☰ A Thorn — a difficulty or challenge, a mistake made, a lesson learned, an insight; an invitation for support.
☰ A Bud — what I shall focus my energy and time on; my goal, my mission, my purpose, my objective; a commitment and an invitation to be held accountable.
In an often very short sharing, the whole family is across how each person is going, what their day was like, what they are working through, and what tomorrow holds.
What began around a dinner table has since found its way into boardrooms, site offices, leadership retreats, and one-on-one coaching sessions — not because it is sophisticated, but because it works. And when you look closely at why it works, you discover that it is doing something far more intentional than it first appears.
Rose, Thorn, Bud is not simply a reflection tool. It is a complete conversation — one that moves deliberately across time, demands a different kind of courage at each step, and draws on the three virtues at the heart of every great leader I have known.
The Rose looks back. The Thorn looks squarely at where you stand right now. The Bud looks forward. And running through each one, in sequence, is Honesty, Humility, and Hard Work.
THE THREE ELEMENTS
ROSE
THE PAST — COMMUNICATION AND CANDOUR — HONESTY
The Rose is a reflection on what has already happened — on the experiences, the efforts, and the outcomes that deserve to be named before the team moves on.
It begins with GRATITUDE — a deliberate pause to acknowledge what went well. Someone who showed up. A decision that held. A moment that reminded the team why the work matters. Gratitude is not a soft opener. It is the act of being honest about what was genuinely good, which is harder than it sounds in environments where praise feels performative and progress is taken for granted.
It extends into RECOGNITION — a specific acknowledgement of effort and accomplishment that might otherwise pass unseen. The people who work hardest in any team are rarely the loudest. The Rose creates a structured, expected moment to surface that effort and honour it publicly before it is forgotten. Recognition is not a soft gesture. It is a retention strategy, a trust signal, and a culture builder all at once.
And it is, at its core, a practice of COMMUNICATION AND CANDOUR — of sharing insights, lessons, and observations with the whole team rather than keeping them locked in individual experience. The Rose asks: what do we know now that we did not know before? What worked, and why? What should be encouraged and rewarded? What would we repeat, and what should become a standard?
This requires Honesty. Not the version of honesty that tells people what they want to hear, but the version that names things precisely — that says “the daily sync helped us catch the critical issue early” rather than “great teamwork.” Specific honesty creates institutional knowledge. Vague praise creates nothing.
The Rose is where an honest team turns its past into its future.
THORN
THE PRESENT — TRUST AND VULNERABILITY — HUMILITY
The Thorn is where the framework earns its credibility — and where most teams either play it safe or avoid it entirely. It is not a reflection on the past or an aspiration for the future. It is a reckoning with the present. With what is hard right now. With what is not working at this moment, in this team, on this pursuit.
The Thorn represents the challenges being faced — a mistake made, a difficulty unresolved, an area where the team knows it is falling short, a lesson still being processed. It is not a complaint. It is not an opportunity to assign blame. It is an honest assessment of where things actually stand, offered with the courage to be seen clearly.
That courage has a name: HUMILITY.
Humility is the hardest of the three virtues to practise in a leadership context precisely because leadership cultures so often reward the appearance of having it all together. Naming a Thorn — genuinely, not performatively — requires a leader to set aside the need to be seen as competent and instead be willing to be seen as human. It is an act of TRUST AND VULNERABILITY, and it is the most powerful signal a leader can send to a team: that honesty about difficulty is not weakness here — it is the standard.
When a leader names a real Thorn, they are extending something into the room that no team-building exercise can manufacture. And when the room receives it with respect rather than judgement, the team becomes something different. Not a group of people doing work together. A group of people willing to go into difficulty together.
Around our dinner table, the Thorn is also an act of seeking help — an INVITATION FOR SUPPORT. That framing matters enormously. It shifts the energy from confession to connection — from “here is where I failed” to “here is where I need you.” That shift is as powerful in a boardroom as it is at home.
The discipline of the Thorn is this: name it clearly, own it without deflection, and immediately ask — what can we do differently? A Thorn without a question is a complaint. A Thorn with a question is leadership.
BUD
THE FUTURE — COMMITMENT AND ACCOUNTABILITY — HARD WORK
The Bud is where the conversation turns from reflection to intention and action. It is the most forward-facing of the three — not a hope or a wish, but a named commitment to a specific objective, goal, or pursuit that the individual or team is choosing to advance.
In a leadership context, the Bud is the answer to the question: what am I committing to next, and am I willing to be held accountable for it?
Done well, the Bud does three things simultaneously. It provides CLARITY — naming the one thing that matters most in the period ahead so that energy is not dispersed across a dozen half-priorities. It ensures PURPOSE ALIGNMENT — giving every team member sight of where collective effort should go and why. And it creates a framework for COMMITMENT AND ACCOUNTABILITY — because naming a commitment publicly, in front of peers, with a specific next session as the moment of reckoning, is one of the most powerful forces for follow-through that exists.
This is where Hard Work finds its structure. Hard work without direction is effort without return. The Bud gives hard work its target — a specific, named, publicly committed-to outcome. A Bud is not a wish list. It is a decision about focus, spoken aloud, with the team as witness.
Accountability is backward-looking — answering for what has already been done. Responsibility is forward-looking — taking account of what your next actions will create in the wider system. The Bud holds both. It says: here is what I am committing to, and here is what I am taking responsibility for ensuring happens.
At home, every Bud is also an invitation — not just to be held accountable, but to be supported. The commitment is made to the group, and the group becomes part of its fulfilment. That dynamic translates directly into high-performing teams.
WHY IT WORKS
THE COMPLETE CONVERSATION
The architecture of Rose, Thorn, Bud is more intentional than it first appears — which is perhaps why it works as naturally around a dinner table as it does in a boardroom.
The Rose opens in the past with Honesty — creating the candour and warmth the team needs for what follows. The Thorn moves into the present with Humility — asking people to trust the room with something real, something unresolved, something still being carried. The Bud lands in the future with Hard Work — channelling everything that has been surfaced into a specific, accountable commitment.
This is the arc of every genuinely high-functioning team conversation: appreciate what was, be honest about what is, commit to what will be. Rose, Thorn, Bud gives that arc a repeatable structure that any team — or family — can run in five minutes, and that done consistently changes the character of a group over time.
Honesty. Humility. Hard Work. The same three virtues that define the H3 leader are the same three virtues that make this framework work. That is not a coincidence. Every great leadership tool, when you look closely enough, is built on the same foundation.
A NOTE ON VANGUARD LEADERSHIP
Rose, Thorn, Bud is most powerful in the hands of a Vanguard.
Vanguard Leadership is not a title or a buzzword.
It is a model of leadership in which individuals and teams are organised not around reporting lines but around pursuits — the key initiatives the organisation must advance — with one named person or team out front, accountable for each.
The Vanguard leads from the front rather than from above, holding both accountability for what has been done and responsibility for what their actions will create next.
In this structure, Rose, Thorn, Bud becomes the connective tissue. The Rose is how Vanguards communicate what is working across overlapping teams. The Thorn is how they model the trust and vulnerability required for a team to follow someone into difficulty. And the Bud is the purest expression of Vanguard thinking — a public commitment to the next objective, made in front of the team, revisited at the next session.
A Vanguard who cannot name a Thorn is a leader who cannot be trusted with one. A Vanguard whose Bud is vague is a Vanguard who has not yet decided. And a Vanguard who skips the Rose has forgotten that people follow leaders who see them, not just leaders who direct them.
Vanguard Leadership is explored in full in another chapter.
WHERE WE APPLY IT
IN THE PURSUIT-BASED OR VANGUARD-LED TEAM
Where Vanguards lead overlapping teams around specific objectives, Rose, Thorn, Bud becomes the primary alignment mechanism — weekly, consistently, without bureaucracy. The Bud in particular is critical: it names the one commitment each Vanguard is accountable for advancing before the team meets again.
IN LEADERSHIP TEAM MEETINGS
Make it a standing agenda item — a five-minute discipline that opens or closes every team meeting. The Rose surfaces what is working and who deserves recognition. The Thorn names what is not, before it becomes a crisis. The Bud keeps the team anchored to its most important forward commitment. Done consistently, this single practice replaces the kind of dysfunction that builds quietly when teams never pause to be honest with each other.
IN THE ONE-ON-ONE
The leader who asks “what is your Rose, your Thorn, your Bud this week?” is asking one of the most complete check-in questions available. In three prompts, you learn what energised the person, what they are carrying right now, and what they need support to achieve next. It replaces the generic “how are you going?” with a structure that actually produces an answer worth hearing.
IN PERSONAL LEADERSHIP PRACTICE
Used as a daily journal prompt, it asks the questions most leaders never ask themselves: what am I genuinely grateful for (Rose — Honesty), what am I honestly grappling with right now (Thorn — Humility), and what am I specifically committing to next (Bud — Hard Work)? This is the reflective discipline that separates leaders who grow from those who accumulate experience without extracting wisdom from it.
IN PERFORMANCE AND DEVELOPMENT CONVERSATIONS
Rather than waiting for a formal review cycle, a leader can open any performance conversation with Rose, Thorn, Bud — inviting the person to self-assess across past, present, and future before offering their own perspective. It creates immediate psychological safety, surfaces insight the leader may not have, and frames the conversation around growth rather than judgement.
HOW TO RUN IT WELL
Set the context clearly. Participants need to understand what they are reflecting on — a project, a quarter, a team period, a specific experience.
Give people quiet time to write before anyone speaks. This prevents groupthink and gives every voice — especially the quieter ones — equal standing.
Ask each person to capture their Rose, Thorn, and Bud before the group convenes. Allow five minutes. Then review together, with each member briefly sharing and the room invited to respond.
When a Rose is shared, amplify the recognition. Name it. Let it land. Do not move past it quickly.
When a Thorn is shared, receive it with respect. The person is extending trust and demonstrating humility. The facilitator’s role is to ensure the room honours that and redirects toward possibility, not judgement.
Before the Bud is finalised, check for alignment. Is this the one commitment the team is behind? Name it clearly. Commit publicly. Revisit at the next session.
THE LEADERSHIP LENS
Rose, Thorn, Bud - asks for Honesty about what has passed. It asks for Humility about what is present. And it asks for the commitment — the Hard Work — of naming what comes next and meaning it.
We are conditioned to move forward. To ship, to decide, to act. Reflection is treated as a luxury, a soft indulgence for teams that are not busy enough. This is precisely backwards. The teams that reflect most consistently are the ones that advance most purposefully. They are honest about what worked. They are humble enough to name what did not. And they commit — specifically, publicly, accountably — to what comes next.
Nick Marvin is the co-founder of marvinHR, a Perth-based executive search and leadership consulting firm. He writes on leadership, character, and team performance at nickmarvin.com.