The work of becoming whole enough to change what surrounds you
Meet Mitsue
Founder of The Fifth Turn. Champion of meaningful change.
About Me
For more than two decades, my work has centered on people: how we understand ourselves, how we navigate one another, and what happens when the systems around us make both harder.
I began my career in education, working with students across cultures, countries, and circumstances. From there, my work expanded into international education, leadership, organizational culture, conflict navigation, employee experience, and human development.
The settings changed, the questions got bigger, but I kept noticing the same thing.
What looks like one problem is rarely just one problem.
An individual struggle can be relational. A conflict between two people can reveal something happening across an entire team. A culture problem can trace back to systems, structures, leadership decisions, and hundreds of small choices made under pressure.
Over time, I came to understand that pattern as fragmentation.
And much of my work since has been about its counterpoint: coherence.
How I Got Here
My career has never followed a perfectly straight line.
I have been an educator, program builder, organizational leader, culture strategist, mediator, facilitator, and advisor. I served as the Founding Director of ODUOnline International, later led diversity, equity, and inclusion work, and eventually built and led an Employee Support & Culture function within Old Dominion University's Division of Digital Transformation & Technology.
Each role gave me a different vantage point from which to understand people and systems.
I saw what happens when people feel deeply connected to a mission but disconnected from one another. I watched organizations articulate values they genuinely believed in while creating systems that made those values difficult to live. I sat inside conflict that looked interpersonal until we began examining the conditions surrounding it.
And I learned that meaningful change rarely comes from addressing only the most visible part of a problem.
We have to be willing to look underneath it.
The Credentials Behind the Work
I hold a Ph.D. in Higher Education from Old Dominion University, an M.A. in English with a concentration in Writing, and a B.A. in English with a minor in Philosophy from Longwood University.
I am a Certified Diversity Executive (CDE®), SHRM-SCP, Nationally Certified Professional in Mediation (NCPM), and Qualified Administrator of the Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI®).
My work draws from organizational culture, adult and human development, conflict navigation, systems thinking, emotional intelligence, intercultural development, and more than two decades spent working with people inside complex institutions.
The Fifth Turn
That understanding eventually became The Five Turns™, my developmental framework for exploring how we move from fragmentation toward coherence.
The Five Turns™ invite us to turn toward ourselves, toward one another, toward the systems shaping our lives, toward integration, and ultimately toward cultural power.
They're not five steps to complete. Life isn't that tidy.
Instead, we move between them, revisit them, and discover something about ourselves that changes how we understand another person. We recognize something in a relationship that reveals something about a system. We see a system differently and realize we have choices we couldn't see before.
That movement—from the individual to the relational to the systemic and back again—is at the heart of my work.
Today, through The Fifth Turn, I work with leaders, teams, and organizations navigating complexity, conflict, transition, cultural fracture, and change. I help them look
beneath the presenting problem, recognize the patterns creating fragmentation, and determine what greater coherence could look like in practice.
I am also the author of the forthcoming Unfragmented: The Five Turns from Fragmentation to Coherence, where I bring these ideas into conversation with something even larger: what it means to become more whole without becoming separate from one another.
What I Believe
don't believe coherence means having everything figured out. It doesn't mean eliminating conflict, contradiction, discomfort, or difference.
Coherence is the ability to remain connected—to ourselves, to one another, to what we value, and to the consequences of our choices—even when things become complicated.
That requires courageous reflection, a sense of responsibility, and the recognition that how we show up in the smallest spaces eventually becomes the culture we create in the largest ones.
That's the work I care about.
And Beyond the Work...
I am a wife, a mom, a writer, a gardener, an animal lover, and a person who is almost always thinking about something.
I love to write. I journal often—not necessarily to document my days, but to make sense of them. Writing has always been one of the ways I figure out what I think, notice what I missed the first time around, and find language for things I can feel before I can fully explain them.
I love books and long conversations. I love being outside, digging in the garden, watching things grow, and getting my hands dirty. I love good friends, laughing with my family, and the ordinary moments that pull me out of my own head and back into whatever is right in front of me.
Our home also includes a small collection of animals, each with a personality considerably larger than necessary. They keep life interesting, occasionally chaotic, and wonderfully grounded.
Dragonflies have long held special meaning for me as symbols of transformation. I am drawn to the idea that profound change does not always require becoming someone entirely new. Sometimes it asks us to see differently, shed what no longer belongs, and become more fully what was already there.
There is a lot of thinking behind The Fifth Turn. There is research, theory, experience, and more than a little time spent staring at a blank page, but underneath all of it is something much simpler.
I care deeply about how we show up for one another.
That is probably the most important thing to know about me.