For more than four decades, I’ve been asking why business sustainability has produced so much activity—and yet so little transformation.
Today, I write, speak, and advise leaders exploring what comes next.
I used to believe the greatest barriers to sustainability were technological, economic, or organizational.
Experience gradually led me somewhere else.
I began asking a different question.
Why has business sustainability produced so much activity—and yet so little transformation?
That question became the foundation of Our Common Future—Now.
Drawing on more than forty years of work with businesses, governments and organizations around the world, the book explores why sustainability appears to have reached a ceiling—and what leaders can do next.
It is not simply another book about sustainability.
It is an invitation to reconsider the assumptions that shape the future before strategy begins.
I started using AI when ChatGPT first became available to the public.
In 2023, while preparing a keynote for the Adhesive and Sealant Association Sustainability Summit, I began to notice something that should concern every business leader.
AI was not simply helping people write faster.
It was also accelerating the old definitions, outdated models, and inherited assumptions almost exponentially.
The more fluent the answer became, the easier it was to miss the assumptions underneath it.
You do not know everything inside an AI model.
You do not know which definitions, beliefs, and defaults shaped the answer it gives you.
And if your organization is using AI to summarize, report, advise, plan, or decide, the business risks may be mounting faster than you have appreciated.
That is the argument behind *Perfectly Wrong*.
Before trusting the answer, examine the assumptions that made the answer possible.
Ideas come alive in conversation.
I speak with leadership teams, conferences, boards, schools, colleges, universities, and professional communities exploring the future of business, stewardship, sustainability, circularity, and artificial intelligence.
Every keynote begins with a question.
Every audience leaves with a different way of seeing.
Speaking formats include keynote presentations, keynote-plus-workshop engagements, and full-day experiences with an evening conversation, salon, dinner dialogue, or book discussion.
The Inquiry is the public continuation of a question that has guided my work for more than forty years.
Each essay explores one aspect of that inquiry—asking better questions before proposing better answers.
Recent essays, podcast conversations and interviews are published regularly.
My work currently centres on five interconnected areas.
How can organizations create enduring value without undermining the conditions their future depends upon?
What happens when sustainability and circular economy are understood as one integrated challenge rather than two separate conversations?
What can enduring living systems teach us about resilience, renewal and long-term value creation?
A three-dimensional framework for understanding creation, maturity, decline and renewal across living and organizational systems.
How AI systems silently add risk through assumptions in their knowledge corpus and a lack of source confirmation.
My books explore the questions.
My speaking brings those ideas to audiences around the world.
My advisory work helps leadership teams apply them.
That advisory work takes place through Circularity Edge, where I work with leaders examining sustainability, circularity, AI risk, business stewardship, and the assumptions shaping their next decisions.
Visit Circularity Edge.
Start With The AI Assumption-Risk Checklist
What are you trying to sustain?
And for how long?
Those two questions have become the foundation of my work.
They may also be the beginning of yours.
If this question belongs in your work, start with the clearest next step.
Read the books, invite me to speak, or explore the advisory work through Circularity Edge.