AI can give you a confident answer to the wrong question.
Your organization is already using AI to research, summarize, analyze, recommend, and draft.
The danger isn’t that AI gets facts wrong. It’s that AI confidently reinforces assumptions nobody has ever examined — and turns them into recommendations, decisions, and disclosures that look perfectly reasonable.
Until someone asks the question nobody thought to ask.
What had to be assumed for that answer to be true?
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 load-bearing, and nobody checked.
- AI is accelerating your unexamined assumptions. AI doesn’t 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, your sustainability claims become liabilities. The EU’s Empowering Consumers Directive bans generic green claims, self-made sustainability labels, and offset-based “carbon neutral” language. Penalties reach 4% of annual turnover. The banned claims were belief gaps made illegal — and the EU is the early warning for everyone else
- The factor that’s never in the equation. Every sustainability gain gets measured and reported. The one factor that compounds underneath them all — perpetual business growth — 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. What can’t we see today because of what we already believe?
Read the EU regulatory briefing →
We are not beginning again. We are beginning from experience.
Nearly fifty years inside this work: twenty years at SC Johnson, seventeen alongside William McDonough and Michael Braungart, 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.
Every engagement follows the same trust flow, shallow to deep. Each step earns the next — you never buy depth you haven’t walked toward.
The keynote is the door. Forty-five to sixty minutes that reframe what your audience believes — about sustainability, about circularity, about the assumptions hiding inside their decisions. From $10,000 plus travel and expenses. This is where most relationships begin.
The workshop is the room. Half-day or full-day working sessions: the product design exercise in teams of six, or the morning-after gap session where your leadership sees its own assumptions on the wall. Priced with the keynote or as standalone engagements.
The Belief-Gap Report is the lens. A 45–60 minute conversation, then analysis: a retrospective report mapping the beliefs shaping your decisions. The method, productized.
The Executive Diagnostic is the deep instrument. $3,500. Your AI assumption-risk examined through the belief-gap lens: your exposure, your Assumption Map, your ceiling.
The advisory embed is the compass. A compass-holder inside your team, through creation and into the operating system. By invitation, after a workshop.
From keynote to the best product launch in company history.
A CEO asked for a “head-twisting” keynote. Instead of an hour behind closed doors, they turned it into a public leadership event — the whole company invited, the local community welcomed, competitors in the room, the local press covering it.
The next morning, his executive team wrote what had stayed with them overnight on a whiteboard. Then we put the company’s own sustainability page on the screen. The gap between what they believed and what they 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. Then years of embedding the new direction into the company’s operating system — until every product ran through the new lens.
That’s the arc: keynote, gap revealed, direction reset, embed. It’s 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.
Restore sustainability to its rightful purpose.
Forty years of experience have revealed the strengths — and the limits — of the sustainability we collectively constructed. The Declaration of Sustainability restores it to its foundation: the continual stewardship of the conditions required for life.
Read it. And if it states what you believe — add your name.
Signing joins the email list. One thoughtful letter a week, no noise.
Begin with a conversation.
Every engagement starts the same way: a thirty-minute exploratory conversation about your situation, the questions you’re asking, and whether there’s an opportunity to work together. No cost, no obligation.