Ken Alston & Kevin De Cuba
Managing Member & Partner, Circularity Edge, LLC.
What business will you be in a score from now and how will you get there while staying in business?
A score is twenty years. The next score has already begun.
The Belief Architecture DiagnosticTM is the instrument that makes that question answerable rather than theoretical. Forty years of sustainability practice, including engagements Ken Alston led during the formation of the Cradle to Cradle Products Innovation Institute, has surfaced a finding the field has not yet named: the practitioner class, working in good faith, has been bridging the gap between where companies are and where they need to be, and bridging it to the wrong shore. The Diagnostic locates the ceiling that your current strategy cannot see, before another score is spent pressing against it.
What the work is for
The work this site offers is built on a foundational claim. Human beings, as the dominant species on Earth, are stewards of the conditions required for life to exist. Required, not preferred. This is not a political position, an ideological commitment, or a contemporary environmental agenda. It is older than any current framing of these questions and belongs to no faction. It is what the evidence — biological, geometric, and observational across decades of practice — actually points toward.
What follows from the claim is the work. Two priorities must be held together: the essential needs of every human being, and the integrity of the natural conditions that make meeting those needs possible across time. The original Brundtland Report named both, and named the hierarchy clearly — meeting the essential needs of the world’s poor first, within the constraints the conditions for life require. Four decades of subsequent practice quietly drifted from this hierarchy. Sustainability discourse migrated into corporate and environmental territory. Poverty became a separate development conversation. The two were never formally separated; they were simply allowed to come apart. This work rejoins them.
Business is the most powerful design instrument the species has ever produced. It is also currently designed around beliefs that are systematically undermining the conditions on which all business — and all life — ultimately depends. The Diagnostic surfaces those beliefs. The frameworks the work draws on, developed over forty-eight years of practice, are how the design instrument is redirected to the work it could be doing.
The full argument — the structural deconstruction of the Brundtland framing, the foundational claim, the twelve belief pairs, the parallel-construction remedy, and the case for what the next score requires — is developed in Our Common Future Now: The Belief Problem Business Has Not Yet Named, forthcoming September 2026 and timed to the fortieth anniversary of the original Brundtland Report. The prologue is available now.
A finding the field has not yet named
For four decades the sustainability and circularity movements have produced extraordinary technical work. New chemistries. New disclosures. New certifications. New roadmaps. New regulatory frameworks. The effort has been genuine. The expense has been real. The trajectory has not bent in proportion to either.
The reason is structural. The practitioner class — internal sustainability teams, external advisors, certification schemes, standards bodies, policy institutions — operates inside a belief framework it inherited and has never examined as belief. From inside that framework, every gap looks bridgeable by another round of practitioner work. From outside it, the bridges have been built to the wrong shore.
The instrument this practice offers does not propose another bridge. It surfaces the framework, pair by pair, in the leadership team’s own language. What the principal sees, when the framework becomes visible, is the question of what business the company is actually in — and what business it would have to become to be in business a score from now.
The remedy the Diagnostic surfaces has a name: parallel construction. The legacy business is treated as runway — finite, declining, still useful — funding a second entity built on different operative beliefs, different unit economics, and protected by a mandate not to be absorbed back into the parent. Where parallel construction is the right move, the Diagnostic shows it. Where the company is genuinely capable of redirection from inside, the Diagnostic shows that too. The decision belongs to the principal. The instrument belongs to Circularity Edge.
That is the work this site offers
Commissioned at the level where design rules are actually set
This work is commissioned by:
- The CEO with enough tenure ahead to act on what the diagnostic surfaces.
- The founder of a founder-led business.
- The board chair of a governed business.
- The next-generation principal in a family-held business at or near generational handover.
- The private-capital backer assessing portfolio reinvention.
If you are reading this and you are a head of sustainability or chief sustainability officer, the work is not commissioned at your level. The role you hold is structurally within the framework of this Diagnostic, which is why the Diagnostic at the leadership level produces what no amount of internal work can. Forward this page to the person in your organization who can commission it.
Practitioners and individual readers will find resources calibrated to their level on the practitioner page.
Four instruments. A coherent path from first conversation to embedded practice.
Each instrument stands alone. Each produces a tangible artefact the principal can hold or point to. Each earns the next.
**INSTRUMENT 1 — The Executive Briefing**
**Price:** $3,500–$5,000 (plus travel and expenses if on-site)
Ninety minutes. The principal plus two or three of their executives. Remote, or on-site at the company.
Three to five Belief Pairs walked against the leadership team’s actual current decisions — not generic cases, not industry abstractions. The principal leaves with a one-page calibrated read: where the organisation sits on those pairs, what the full Diagnostic would deepen, and what a ninety-day engagement could produce.
The function of the briefing is not consultation. It is a working session that earns the right to recommend the Diagnostic.
Inquire about an Executive Briefing →
**INSTRUMENT 2 — The Belief Architecture Diagnostic™ at the Leadership Level**
**Price:** $8,500
Four to six weeks. Three to six members of the leadership team.
The full Diagnostic across the twelve belief pairs, plus the split-level pattern that produces ceilings even where the commitment is genuine — the case where an organisation holds the right beliefs at one layer while the layer beneath remains inside the framework being challenged. Conversation transcripts read for what the language structurally reveals about the operative beliefs governing decisions, as distinct from what the team says it believes.
Output: a board-readable Belief Gap Map identifying the ceiling the current strategy cannot see, the five questions the existing belief framework is not preparing the company to ask, and the basis on which a ninety-day engagement is scoped.
Inquire about the Diagnostic →
**INSTRUMENT 3 — The Ninety-Day Transition Engagement**
**Price:** $25,000–$75,000 (plus travel and expenses)
Ninety days. One arena selected from the Diagnostic — a product, a category, a sourcing decision, a launch, a business-model pilot — walked through all seven steps of Design Like Nature™, coherent from start to finish.
Not theory. Not strategy. A working example of structural belief change applied to one decision the company is actually making.
Output: the launch or pilot itself, plus the documented playbook the organisation can show its own people, customers, board, and capital partners. Pricing scales to organisation size and arena complexity.
Inquire about a Ninety-Day Engagement →
**INSTRUMENT 4 — The Parallel Construction Retainer**
**Price:** $5,000 per month
Ongoing advisory as the new operating instructions are embedded across the company. Monthly working call with the principal and leadership team. On-demand counsel between calls.
Each next decision the company faces — new launch, new sourcing arrangement, new category, new acquisition, new succession — calibrated against the compass the Diagnostic established.
https://bookme.name/kenalston/exploratoryInquire about Retainer Engagement →
The frameworks the work is built on
The Diagnostic is the gate. What it opens onto is a working architecture for sustainable business developed across forty-eight years of practice — at SC Johnson, inside the seventeen-year collaboration with William McDonough and Michael Braungart, in the formation of the Sustainable Packaging Coalition and the Cradle to Cradle Products Innovation Institute, and in the independent practice that followed.
The Tactical Tetrahedron™ is the structural model that corrects the flat two-dimensional misdefinition of sustainability that has organized the field for forty years. Design Like Nature™ is the operative practice — the seven-step method, with Stage 0 (the Diagnostic) sitting in front, that an organization engages with when incremental improvement is no longer enough. Sustainable Circularity™ addresses the most consequential conceptual error in current circular-economy practice. The full body of work, with the supporting concepts that surface inside engagements, is on the frameworks page.
The frameworks the work is built on →
Keynotes and workshops
The framework’s contributions are also delivered directly to industry summits, corporate boards, leadership teams, and executive programs. For many principal-level audiences, the keynote or workshop is the practical entry to the work — lower commitment, broader audience reach, and budget categories that move faster than the consulting path.
The signature keynote — What Are You Trying to Sustain, and For How Long? Forty-five to sixty minutes. The structural argument the framework rests on, developed for the audience and venue. Audiences from intimate board sessions to large industry events. $5,000 plus travel and expenses.
A bespoke keynote can be developed for venues with a specific question — a board strategy retreat, a sector-specific conference, a private capital portfolio convening, an executive program module, a leadership team offsite. Drawing on forty-eight years of practice and the full framework, the keynote is calibrated to the venue’s specific question rather than delivering the signature set piece. Pricing scales from $7,500, depending on preparation and venue requirements, plus travel and expenses.
The workshop. Up to thirty participants in groups of six. A thirty-to-forty-minute mini-keynote introduces the framework. Groups then work through a sustainable-circular product design exercise from a brief Ken supplies. The session closes with each group pitching its design and receiving structured feedback. Half-day format. $7,500 plus travel and expenses.
The combined day. Keynote and workshop merged into one full-day session for organizations that want the framing and the applied work together. $10,000 plus travel and expenses.
Speaking inquiries are handled through TheKenAlston.com.
Inquire about a keynote or workshop →
Twenty years on, what the office furniture industry shows
In the early 2000s, during the formation period of the Cradle to Cradle Products Innovation Institute, Ken led one of the celebrated C2C engagements at Steelcase. The work succeeded by every measure the field used at the time. Press coverage landed. Executive ranks shifted. The product launched and became the company’s best launch in its history.
Across the same period, Herman Miller — now Miller Knoll — did parallel work in the same field. Twenty-five years of committed C2C practice. Industry leadership. Exceptional technical depth.
Twenty years later, both companies still sell office furniture in essentially the same way they did before. Point-of-sale revenue. Ownership transfers at the loading dock. End-of-use is the customer’s problem, the dealer’s problem, the waste handler’s problem. The loop the framework was designed to close is still open.
In a public podcast conversation in early 2026, a senior sustainability practitioner from one of the two majors named the ceiling himself. After twenty-five years of committed work at one of the most sophisticated sustainability practices in the industry, he described end-of-use as the toughest area to capture and connect because of the economic element. The economic element, on examination, is not a market reality. It is a belief about where the company’s responsibility ends — a belief that has never been examined as belief. That observation, more than any other in the practice archive, is where the structural finding this Diagnostic now surfaces became impossible to unsee.
A British company, Orangebox, was attempting to operate differently. It was acquired by Steelcase. Whether the operating beliefs Orangebox carried have held inside the parent is a question this work was built to answer carefully rather than to assert.
This is the structural pattern. Two world-class sustainability practices, each with more than twenty years of genuine commitment, both held at the same ceiling — not by lack of effort or intention, but by the framework inside which every effort has been organized.
Circularity Edge does not offer the practice that produced the ceiling. It offers the practice that surfaces it before another score of 20 years is spent pressing against it.
Forty-eight years inside the practice now under examination
Ken Alston founded Circularity Edge after four decades in the sustainability and circularity practice — much of it focused on work that helped set the very ceiling this Diagnostic now surfaces. The acknowledgment is the credential.
- **Twenty-year score at SC Johnson** (1979–2000) · Manager, later Director of Global Products Responsibilities Worldwide for the final eight years.
- **Sustainable Packaging Coalition** · Program manager for the launch of the program.
- **Cradle to Cradle Products Innovation Institute** · Managed the formation of the institute and the creation of Version 1.0 of the product certification program on behalf of William McDonough and Michael Braungart.
- **Belief Architecture Diagnostic™** · Developed across the past three years on the basis of the practice archive, validated against more than thirty years of comparative practitioner transcripts.
Author of *Our Common Future Now: The Belief Problem Business Has Not Yet Named*, forthcoming September 2026.
Read the prologue. Read the argument before it lands.
*Our Common Future Now* is the book the Diagnostic is built on. The full belief framework, the twelve belief pairs, the structural finding the Diagnostic now surfaces, the parallel construction remedy, and the case for what the next score requires — all are developed in full there. The book publishes in September 2026, timed to the inaugural Real Circularity Summit in London on the fortieth anniversary of the Brundtland Report.
The prologue is available now, in advance, at thekenalston.com.
Inquire about a Keynote →Begin the conversation
Inquiries from CEOs, founders, board chairs, principals, and capital partners are read by Ken directly. A response will arrive within two business days. Indicate the instrument you are considering, the company context, and any timing constraints.
Circularity Edge LLC
Ken Alston, Managing Member · Kevin DeCuba, Partner — South America and Caribbean
For author and speaker enquiries: TheKenAlston.com
For UK and European events: RealCircularity.com
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