Why do intelligent organisations keep creating outcomes they never intended?
Ken Alston has spent nearly fifty years inside sustainable business. He helps leadership teams see the assumptions underneath their decisions, so that they can choose before those assumptions choose for them.
I am inspired to look at why human activities are unsustainable and help move them towards sustainable circular solutions. I believe this is honorable and worthy work that I can get excited to champion.
Ken Alston
The problem is not carelessness. Human activities produce results nobody chose: targets met on paper while the totals move the wrong way, claims published in good faith that the record cannot carry, decisions scaled before anyone examined what they stood on. AI now produces those consequences at machine speed, because it inherits the assumptions underneath the decision and returns them as a confident answer.
Circularity Edge offers a mirror. A room, a leadership team or a single reader is shown its own record and its own words, and what the reflection reveals is the belief gap: the distance between what an organisation believes about itself and what it can actually substantiate. Naming that distance, while there is still time to choose, is the work.
Ken Alston addressing an audience and holding Our Common Future – Now at the Real Circularity Summit, London, September 2026.
What’s keeping executives up at night?
There are three doors into this work, and every executive who walks through one of them is awake at 3am for the same underlying reason: something they believed turned out to be carrying the decision, and nobody checked.
- AI is accelerating your unexamined assumptions. AI does not eliminate the assumption problem. It inherits it, and scales it into board materials, disclosures and strategy before anyone thinks to check. Every AI-supported decision is a belief, automated.
- On September 27, 2026, sustainability claims became liabilities. The European Union’s new rules on environmental claims ban generic green claims, self-made sustainability labels and offset-based “carbon neutral” language. Penalties reach 4 percent of annual turnover. The banned claims were belief gaps made illegal, and the European Union is the early warning for everyone else. In this work, regulation is a door and a date, never the identity of the practice.
- The factor that is never in the equation. Every sustainability gain gets measured and reported. The one factor that compounds underneath them all, perpetual business growth in material throughput, never appears in the math. Efficiency gets celebrated while the growth it was meant to offset quietly outruns it. Nobody puts it in the equation, because nobody questions it.
We are not beginning again. We are beginning from experience.
Nearly fifty years inside this work: twenty years at SC Johnson, seventeen years alongside William McDonough and Dr Michael Braungart, ten of them as chief executive of their Cradle to Cradle consulting firm, and nine years of independent practice through Circularity Edge.
Keynote stages from London to Latin America. Two new books, launched September 2026.
The question that has guided it all: why do intelligent organizations keep creating outcomes they never intended?
Where the work begins.
Start with a conversation. A thirty-minute exploratory conversation sorts the situation and names the right door: an event, a working room, one artefact, the organisation itself, or no engagement yet.
The keynote is the public door. Squaring the Circle separates growth from throughput in the room, so that a leadership team can name the targets that depend on more material passing through the business and choose the first places where revenue can grow while throughput falls. From $10,000 plus travel and expenses.
The design workshop is the working room. Teams of about six design a product in hand and audit what the design assumed, so that the questions can be carried back to their own portfolio at the next design gate. The standalone workshop is priced in conversation, once the room and the purpose are clear.
When a keynote is under discussion, the morning-after executive session can be added. The leadership team writes, from memory, what stayed with it overnight. That recall is set beside the company’s own published sustainability account, and the distance between the two is the work of the morning, so that direction can be reset on shared ground while the team is still together. Taken with the keynote, the combined engagement is The Mirror Package, from $12,500 plus travel and expenses.
The Belief Gap Diagnostic is the private examination. It examines the organisation. Where the concern is one consequential AI-supported decision, document or workflow, that is the same diagnostic applied to that concern, not a separate product. The fee is private. It is quoted after the exploratory conversation, once the scope is clear, so that leadership can see which of its beliefs it can substantiate before a decision, a claim, or a disclosure is scaled.
From keynote to the best product launch in company history.
A chief executive asked for a “head-twisting” keynote for his executive team. Ken set the event up instead as a public leadership evening: the whole company invited, the local community welcomed, competitors in the room, the local press covering it. William McDonough gave the keynote. Ken ran the executive session the next morning.
That morning, the executive team wrote what had stayed with them overnight on a whiteboard. Then the company’s own sustainability page went on the screen beside it. The distance between what they believed and what the company claimed was not a gap. It was a chasm.
An advisor embedded in the next product team. The fastest, best-regarded launch in the company’s history followed. Then years of embedding the new direction into the company’s operating system, until every product ran through the new lens.
That is the arc: keynote, gap revealed, direction reset, embed. It has been working for twenty years.
Two books. One inquiry.
Our Common Future Now is the deeper book: forty years after the Brundtland Report, what four decades of sustainability effort actually teach us — and what comes next.
Perfectly Wrong is the timely book: what happens when AI becomes exceptionally good at repeating conclusions built on assumptions nobody questioned.
Both launched at the Real Circularity Summit, London, September 17, 2026.
Begin With Your own Situation
Your situation may not arrive wearing one of these names. It may not match a listed door at all. The exploratory conversation is a genuinely open door, not a step in a sequence: thirty minutes about your situation and the questions you are asking, at no cost and with no obligation, including the honest answer that no engagement fits yet, and room for the engagement nobody has listed.
It closes, as every piece of this work closes, on two questions:
What had to be assumed for that answer to be true?
What can’t we see today because of what we already believe?