Forty-eight years inside the practice now under examination
The acknowledgment is the credential.
Circularity Edge was founded by Ken Alston after forty-eight years in the sustainability and circularity practice — much of it focused on work that produced the very ceiling the Belief Architecture Diagnostic™ now surfaces. The Diagnostic is not the latest expression of that practice. It is the instrument that became necessary when the limits of that practice became impossible to ignore.
The arc, briefly
Ken Alston’s career divides into three roughly equal phases.
The first was twenty years at SC Johnson, joining in 1979 and serving as Manager, then Director of Global Product Responsibilities Worldwide for the final eight years, based in Racine, Wisconsin. The work covered the period in which the consumer goods industry first began to take environmental responsibility seriously as a strategic question, not a public-relations one. The portfolio included reformulation, packaging redesign, supply-chain reconsideration, and the early structural questions about how a private company in family hands organizes itself around responsibilities longer than its quarterly cycle.
The second was seventeen years working with William McDonough and Michael Braungart on the development and deployment of Cradle to Cradle design. During this period, Ken managed the formation of the Cradle to Cradle Products Innovation Institute and the creation of Version 1.0 of the product certification program on behalf of McDonough and Braungart. He was program manager for the launch of the Sustainable Packaging Coalition. Through this period, he led, advised on, or witnessed at close range many of the engagements that the field still cites as exemplars of C2C-aligned product development — including the engagement with Steelcase that produced the Think chair.
The third phase is the work since approximately 2015 — eleven years of independent practice during which the patterns that the Belief Architecture Diagnostic was eventually built to surface became impossible to ignore. The phase produced the Circularity Catalyst podcast and the comparative practitioner transcript archive that grew from it, the proprietary frameworks the practice now uses (Tactical Tetrahedron™, Design Like Nature™ in its current articulation, Vitacide Risk™, Sustainable Circularity™), and ultimately the Belief Architecture Diagnostic™ itself, developed across the past three years on the basis of more than thirty years of accumulated transcript material. The Diagnostic is the practice this site now offers; the work that made it possible is the phase that produced it.
The frameworks the practice now operates with are described in full on the frameworks page.
A practice in parallel construction with itself
The Belief Architecture Diagnostic does not represent a continuation of the previous forty-eight years of work. It represents the recognition that the previous forty-eight years of work, however genuine, however technically excellent, however celebrated within the field, has been operating inside a belief framework it inherited and never examined.
That recognition includes the work I led myself.
The C2C engagement with Steelcase in the early 2000s succeeded by every measure the field used at the time. The product launched. The press landed. The company called it their best launch in history. Twenty years later, the company sells office furniture in essentially the same way it always did. Point-of-sale revenue. Ownership transfers at the loading dock. End-of-use is the customer’s problem. The framework C2C provided was real. The sustainably circular transition it described did not occur. Not because the framework failed, but because the underlying belief framework was never on the table. We worked at the design layer. The business-model layer remained inside the framework being challenged.
The same pattern, at the same depth, is visible in every comparable engagement in the field. Including those carried by colleagues I respect deeply, working at companies whose commitment was equal to or greater than Steelcase’s. The pattern is structural. It is not personal. And it is the pattern this practice now exists to make visible, before another twenty years are spent producing it again.
This is what the practice means when it speaks of parallel construction. The legacy practice, the forty-eight years that produced the ceiling, is treated as runway. Funding the development of a second practice, built on different operative beliefs, with the explicit mandate not to be reabsorbed into the framework that produced the first one. The legacy is not abandoned. It is allocated.
That structural posture applies to the practice itself as much as to the engagements it now offers principals. Circularity Edge is not the next chapter of an existing consultancy. It is the second entity. The Belief Architecture Diagnostic is the instrument the second entity uses and the only one it sells.
The roles, in their precise form
The credentials below are stated with the precision that the field tends to soften when summarising them. Each is exactly true; each is also, in the architecture this practice now operates under, an acknowledgment of where the work that follows it became necessary.
- SC Johnson · 1979–2000. Joined SC Johnson in 1979. In 1992, became one of the first dedicated corporate sustainability practitioners at a major multinational corporation, serving as Manager of Global Products Responsibilities Worldwide, and later promoted to Director of Global Products Responsibilities Worldwide. Based in Racine, Wisconsin, 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.
- Cradle to Cradle design implementation engagements. Lead or close advisor on engagements with Steelcase, Herman Miller (now Miller Knoll), and many others across the period of the framework’s most active commercial deployment.
- Belief Architecture Diagnostic™. The practice’s central instrument, developed on the basis of forty years of practitioner observation across furniture, textiles, fashion, packaging, food, and policy. The Diagnostic operates through structured confidential conversation with the principal or practitioner, analyzed across three layers against the framework of paired beliefs developed in Our Common Future Now.
- Author. Our Common Future Now: The Belief Problem Business Has Not Yet Named, forthcoming September 2026.
The argument the practice rests on
Our Common Future Now is the book that develops the full argument the Belief Architecture Diagnostic operationalizes. The thirteenth-finding pattern, the twelve belief pairs, the parallel construction remedy, the case for what the next score requires — all are developed in the book. Publication is timed to the inaugural Real Circularity Summit in London in September 2026, on the fortieth anniversary of the Our Common Future report by the World Commission on Environment and Development.
The prologue is available in advance at thekenalston.com. The keynote at the Real Circularity Summit, delivered alongside Real Circularity’s co-founder Rachel Kan, will publicly introduce the argument for the first time.
Who else is involved
The work of the Belief Architecture Diagnostic and the engagements that follow it is delivered personally by Ken. The instrument is calibrated to the reading judgment of a single practitioner, and that calibration is what makes it work. The practice does not subcontract the Diagnostic or the engagements.
Two relationships shape the broader practice.
Kevin DeCuba is a partner in Circularity Edge. He carries the practice in Latin America and the Caribbean, where engagements are structured as joint work between Ken and Kevin. Ken brings the diagnostic instrument and the underlying intellectual framework, working with the principal in English; Kevin brings the local-language facilitation, the institutional contextualization, and the substantive work inside the institution’s operating environment in Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, or his native Aruban Papiamento, as the engagement requires. For principals in those regions, the engagement is commissioned to the practice and delivered by both partners as a working pair. For engagements outside those regions, Ken delivers the work directly, with Kevin’s involvement, where occasionally relevant, named transparently at the scoping stage.
Real Circularity, founded by Rachel Kan and based in the United Kingdom, is the collaboration through which the inaugural Real Circularity Summit Live and the September 2026 keynote take place. Real Circularity’s domain is circular design, supply-chain reinvention, and the practical work of building circular ventures. Circularity Edge’s domain is the Belief Architecture Diagnostic and the leadership-level engagements the Diagnostic produces. The two practices are distinct. Rachel is not a partner in Circularity Edge; the collaboration is specific to the work it covers.
Where to begin
The Belief Architecture Diagnostic is commissioned through one of two pathways.
For founders, chief executives, board chairs, principals, and capital backers commissioning multi-year work on their institution’s operative beliefs, the pathway is the work with your institution.
For practitioners and individuals commissioning their own diagnostic, the pathway is the work with you.
Inquiries that do not fit either pathway clearly can be sent to ken.alston@circularityedge.com. A response will arrive within two business days.