About

I spent forty years helping businesses become what they said they wanted to be.

That is the honest summary of a career that included creating one of the first corporate sustainability departments at a major multinational, launching the Sustainable Packaging Coalition, managing the formation of the Cradle to Cradle Products Innovation Institute, and seventeen years working directly with William McDonough and Michael Braungart on the most ambitious sustainability design instrument the field has produced.

The instruments improved. The trajectory didn’t move in proportion.

Not because the people applying them lacked commitment. Not because the science was wrong. Not because the effort was insufficient. Because the beliefs governing what any of those instruments was allowed to become — the operative beliefs embedded in capital allocation decisions, design briefs, procurement criteria, and supplier contracts — were never the target of any instrument we built.

That is the precise finding forty years produced. Not a criticism of the movement. A structural observation about where it was working and where it wasn’t. The Belief Architecture Diagnostic™ is the instrument I built when I finally understood what the missing layer was.

The work

Circularity Edge operates at the belief layer — the level upstream of every strategy, instrument, certification, and reporting structure the sustainability movement has built.

Most sustainability work begins at the strategy layer and asks: what should we do differently? The Belief Architecture Diagnostic begins one layer upstream and asks: what does this organization actually believe, at the level that governs its decisions when the alternatives are inconvenient? The gap between what an organization says it believes and what its decisions reveal it believes is where every instrument eventually reaches its ceiling. The Diagnostic maps that gap precisely — from the organization’s own language, not from a survey or a self-assessment.

The output is a written Belief Gap Map: a named, structured document that identifies which operative beliefs currently govern the organization’s decisions, where they diverge from beliefs that would produce different outcomes, and the specific ceiling each divergence creates. It is the starting point for everything that follows.

The Diagnostic is the first step in the Design Like Nature™ eight-step sequence — the recalibration methodology developed over thirty years of applied practice. The sequence begins at Stage 0, the belief examination, because without it every subsequent step is applied to an unchanged Belief Architecture™ and will produce the same ceiling, with greater sophistication and the same structural limitation.

Ken Alston

Founder | Principal

Ken grew up in Preston, Lancashire, the home of Richard Arkwright, where the Industrial Revolution was not something you read about in history books but something your parents lived through. He studied chemistry, chose a sandwich university because he wanted to touch the work rather than just read about it, and built a career in consumer products that eventually led him to America for what was described as a two-year assignment.

The two-year assignment became eight years at SC Johnson, where he created one of the earliest corporate sustainability departments in a multinational company. He compiled global data for one of the first annual sustainability reports. He watched the eco-efficiency ceiling assert itself — genuine improvements in specific metrics, an unchanged trajectory at the system level — and understood that something was missing without yet being able to name it.

He left and spent seventeen years working directly with William McDonough and Michael Braungart. He helped launch the Sustainable Packaging Coalition. He managed the formation of the Cradle to Cradle Products Innovation Institute and the creation of its product certification program. He watched the most ambitious design framework in the field change products but not the operating logic of the organizations that made them. He kept watching the ceiling.

The naming came slowly, through forty years of proximity to the problem. The Belief Architecture™— the operative beliefs governing decisions at a level below where any strategy conversation could reach — was where the ceiling was built. It was also where the work had to begin. That recognition is what produced the Belief Architecture Diagnostic™, and what this book — Our Common Future Now: The Belief Problem Business Has Not Yet Named, publishing September 2026 — is the full account of.

Ken is based in Charlottesville, Virginia. He delivers the Belief Architecture Diagnostic personally, in every engagement.

Kevin De Cuba

Partner | Americas

Kevin DeCuba is Ken’s partner and leads Circularity Edge’s work across South America and the Caribbean. He is the founder of the Americas Sustainable Development Foundation, the Circular Economy Platform of the Americas, and the Circular Economy Forum of the Americas.

Kevin brings deep regional expertise, long-standing relationships across Latin America and the Caribbean, and the cultural and linguistic range — including Spanish-language delivery — that makes the work genuinely accessible rather than merely translated. He contextualizes the Circularity Edge instruments for the specific economic structures, regulatory environments, and business cultures of each region.

Enquiries for South American and Caribbean engagements go directly to Kevin.

UK and Europe

For organizations in the UK and European markets, the Belief Architecture Diagnostic™ and the Design Like Nature™ instruments are delivered in partnership with Real Circularity. Enquiries for UK and European engagements are handled through RealCircularity.com.

Who the work is for

The Belief Architecture Diagnostic is designed for executives who are experiencing the gap — who have invested seriously in sustainability and are watching the trajectory resist the investment. It is not for organizations at the beginning of their sustainability journey, and it is not a diagnostic of what the organization should do. It is a diagnostic of what the organization actually believes, at the level that governs what it will allow itself to do.

The right reader for this page should recognize something in that description. If the recognition is uncomfortable, that is not a warning sign. It is the signal the Diagnostic is designed to surface.

Every engagement begins at Stage 0, the Belief Architecture Diagnostic™. The diagnostic surfaces the operative beliefs that are governing the organization’s decisions under pressure and maps the gap between where those beliefs are and where the recalibration requires them to be. What comes next is determined by what the map reveals, not by a standard program.

This is not advisory work imposed from outside. It is facilitated examination from within, with the leadership team present, active, and accountable throughout.

Begin

The first step is a discovery conversation — thirty minutes, no charge, with Ken. He will tell you honestly whether the Diagnostic is the right instrument for what your organization is experiencing.

Enduring enterprises are not optimized.
They are designed.