I grew up in Preston, Lancashire — a mill town. Richard Arkwright built his first factory there. The Industrial Revolution was not something we read about in history books. It was something our parents lived through, and something the town was still living with when I was growing up. That context never left me.
I studied chemistry because I wanted to understand how things actually work at the level below the visible. I chose a sandwich university because I wanted to touch the work rather than only read about it. After graduating, I joined Beecham Products R&D in Coleford, in the Forest of Dean, as a Food Scientist. Three years later, in 1979, I joined SC Johnson at the British subsidiary. The work was product development. It was the first chapter of what became a twenty-one-year arc with the company.
The SC Johnson years
Thirteen years of those twenty-one were in the United Kingdom and across the European R&D function. Quality audit, packaging and process development, new product marketing, then Director of Research and Development for SC Johnson’s European operations. In 1992 I transferred to the United States — a two-year assignment that became eight, and the first chapter of the second half of my career.
The role at SC Johnson’s corporate headquarters in Racine, Wisconsin was Manager (later Director) of Global Products Responsibilities, in the Office of Environment and Safety Actions Worldwide. It was one of the first dedicated environmental responsibility positions at a major multinational consumer goods company. ESG did not yet exist as a category. Sustainability reporting was not yet standard practice. Most organisations did not yet have a name for what I was trying to do, and the term “sustainability” itself was not yet in widespread use in corporate vocabulary.
I compiled global data for one of the first annual environmental responsibility reports a multinational consumer goods company had ever produced. I led the company’s eco-efficiency initiatives. I 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.
That something took me twenty more years to name with precision.
Seventeen years with McDonough and Braungart
I left SC Johnson in 2000 and joined MBDC — the consulting practice William McDonough and Michael Braungart had founded to deliver Cradle to Cradle to companies. The role progressed across seventeen years and three months: senior advisor, then Chief of Staff to William McDonough, then CEO of MBDC. During a 2003–2004 secondment to the GreenBlue Institute, I managed the programme that launched the Sustainable Packaging Coalition. Around 2010, while serving as CEO, I managed the formation of the Cradle to Cradle Products Innovation Institute and the creation of Version 1.0 of its product certification programme. The Institute’s launch ceremony in California included a public appearance by then-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. I have a photograph from that day.
Cradle to Cradle was — and remains — the most ambitious sustainability design system the field has produced. I helped translate the philosophy into business practice across dozens of organisations. I worked closely with the engagements the field still cites as exemplars of C2C-aligned product development.
The instruments improved. The products improved. The trajectory did not change in proportion.
I watched organisations achieve Cradle to Cradle certification on product lines, join the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s Global Commitment, report impressive circular metrics — and continue to operate within a linear growth model whose governing logic had never been examined. The certification was genuine. The circularity was technical. The operative belief layer underneath was untouched.
That observation took me twenty years to name with precision. The beliefs governing what any framework is allowed to become were never the target of the work. They were the thing every instrument assumed had already been addressed. They had not been. They are not now. And until they are, every instrument reaches the same ceiling — with greater sophistication and the same structural limitation.
The finding
The Belief Architecture Diagnostic™ is the instrument I built when I finally understood what the missing layer was.
Every organisation operates on two levels of belief simultaneously. The first is what the leadership team says it believes — the commitments in the annual report, the sustainability strategy everyone aligned on at the offsite. The second is what the organisation actually believes — revealed not by what people say but by the decisions they make when those stated beliefs become costly. The capital allocation that went the other way. The design decision that arrived fully formed. The supplier kept on for cost reasons no one wanted to say out loud.
The gap between those two levels is not a culture problem, a talent problem, or a communication problem. It operates at a level below where any strategy, instrument, or investment can reach it. Chris Argyris called this the difference between espoused theory and theory-in-use. The sustainability movement has been working at the level of espoused theory for forty years. The theory-in-use has never been the instrument’s target.
Until now.
The Diagnostic also surfaces what I came to call the split-level pattern — the case where an organisation holds the right beliefs at one layer of the company while the layer beneath remains inside the framework being challenged. That pattern is the most common shape of practitioner-class failure: genuine commitment at the design layer, untouched belief structure at the business-model layer. It is the pattern that produces ceilings even where commitment is genuine.
The book and the work now
Our Common Future Now: The Belief Problem Business Has Not Yet Named publishes in September 2026, timed to the inaugural Real Circularity Summit in London on the fortieth anniversary of the Our Common Future report by the World Commission on Environment and Development. The book is the full account of forty-eight years of work, the precise findings those years produced, and the eight-step Design Like Nature™ method for organizations ready to address the upstream layer that no other instrument reaches.
The prologue is available now, in advance, at the Books page.
The Belief Architecture Diagnostic™ and the engagements that follow it — the Executive Briefing, the leadership-level Diagnostic, the Ninety-Day Transition Engagement, the Parallel Construction Retainer — are delivered through Circularity Edge, the consulting practice founded in 2017 for that purpose. The full description of the consulting practice and its instruments is at CircularityEdge.com.
Speaking and workshop inquiries are handled directly through this site, with a dedicated booking link for a speaking call.
Geography and the current base
I am based in Charlottesville, Virginia. I work globally in English. The keynote at the inaugural Real Circularity Summit in September 2026, in London, marks the first public delivery of the full Belief Architecture argument. Beyond that engagement, speaking commitments and consulting engagements are open across North America, Europe, South America, and Asia.
Inquire
The right starting point depends on what you are looking for.
For a keynote or workshop: see the Speaking page for available formats and to book a speaking call.
For the Belief Architecture Diagnostic or organisational engagements: visit CircularityEdge.com.
/books/For the book and the prologue: see the Books page.
For media inquiries, writing collaborations, and anything that does not fit the categories above: write to ken.alston@circularityedge.com. A response will arrive within two business days.