Dunkirk Spirit and Circular Transformation
Last week, we covered the crisis of—and opportunity for— imagination in business. Our next stop on the Circudyne Odyssey is Dunkirk: the movie, and the historical event. In which we explore how cultural momentum shifts when formal institutions become unfit for purpose, and how distributed action fills the gap. It builds on insights from previous Letters about why circular transformation requires new forms of fitness.
- Dunkirk Spirit and Circular Transformation
The Deep Draft Problem
In late May of 1940, the British Royal Navy faced a problem that had nothing to do with courage and everything to do with design.
The British Expeditionary Force was trapped on the beaches of Dunkirk. The Royal Navy possessed the mightiest fleet in the world. They had destroyers, cruisers, and battleships capable of projecting power anywhere on the globe. But for the specific mission at hand, the Navy was functionally useless.
The problem was their draft. A British destroyer required nearly 15 feet of water to float. The beaches at Dunkirk were shallow and gently sloping. A destroyer trying to reach the men would run aground hundreds of yards out.
This is a critical lesson from Dunkirk: An institution can be perfect for one mission and fatally unfit for another. The Royal Navy was fit for the purpose of deep-sea domination; it was physically unfit for shallow-water rescue.
In the hours they had to close the gap, the Admiralty couldn't build new destroyers. So they summoned the "Little Ships"—civilian yachts, fishing trawlers, lifeboats. Vessels that were fit for the specific purpose of navigating the shallows.
This historical lesson became part of the foundation of my thinking on circularity. Years ago, I watched an interview with Kenneth Branagh during the publicity tour for the film Dunkirk. He spoke about the hard lesson Britons learned regarding the paralysis of their institutions and the heroism of the civilian mariners.
To find my own place in the Circular Economy, I used that historical example as a lens. I realized we were seeing the exact same misalignment of purpose playing out today.
We see this paralysis at work today not in the English Channel, but the Say–Do Gap.
Structure, Not Psychology
The Say–Do Gap is the obsession of every sustainability conference. The data is consistent: customers say they want sustainable products. They claim they care about the climate. But when the moment comes to buy, they don't follow through. They stick to the cheap, linear, disposable option.
The standard interpretation of this gap is psychological. We blame the customer. We say they are hypocritical, or unrealistic, or simply price-sensitive. We treat the customer like a soldier on the beach who refuses to swim out to the destroyer.
But the older I get, the more I am convinced that the Say–Do Gap isn't psychological. It is structural.
The customer is not being inconsistent. The customer is a soldier waiting on the beach, and the linear economy won't stop sending deep-draft destroyers. The current industrial system is optimized for massive scale, standardization, and throughput. It is fit for the purpose of feeding consumption for its own sake, not the needs of a customer living a sustainable lifestyle.
The "Gap" is simply the distance between what the institution was built to do and what the reality now requires.
The Trap of Past Success
Why can't the big institutions just re-fit themselves for the new purpose?
In 1940, the Navy's draft was determined by the weight of its armor and guns—assets that were indispensable for deep-sea combat, but which rendered the ships unfit for a shallow-water rescue. In 2025, the "draft" of a linear corporation is determined by a similar heavy burden. Its "armor" consists of the capital and capabilities that are essential for the linear economy, but which become stranded assets—unfit for purpose—in the Circular Century.
These companies are paralyzed by the economic forces bound to protect the status quo. But these assets aren't just physical infrastructure like oil pipelines. They are the economic models themselves.
Consider a fast-fashion giant. Their factories are efficient, but they are optimized to produce goods that are disposable—products designed for planned obsolescence. The company's entire value proposition, brand positioning, and unit economics rely on the customer throwing that product away and buying a new one.
To align with consumer preferences informed by environmental realities, they would have to dismantle the very engine that generates their profit. The producers with the most success at the linear model have the most to lose from changing it. They are immobilized not by a lack of desire, but by their previous success. They are so perfectly fitted to the old world that they cannot move in the new one.
I have seen this "fitness trap" before.
In Automotive
Growing up, I was obsessed with the car industry. In the 1970s and 80s, Detroit executives would shrug off low quality as a reality of doing business. 'Customers don't pay for quality,' they said. As I explored in Circularity is Lean 2.0, what Detroit couldn't see was that quality wasn't an add-on cost—it was a systematic competitive advantage. Toyota's Lean methodology didn't ask customers to pay more for quality; it made quality cheaper than defects by building it into the system itself.
The fitness trap works the same way. Detroit's institutions were fit for volume manufacturing at the cost of precision. Toyota proved you could have both—but only by fundamentally redesigning what 'fitness' meant.
In Airlines
I encountered this again in the 1990s, from two different vantage points.
First, I worked marketing airliners to major carriers. My team had data proving passengers valued comfort, but the airline CFOs refused to pay for it. Their procurement models were built for a commodity market; they literally didn't know how to position a superior product because they couldn't imagine, and therefore calculate, the revenue lift. They were stuck in the status quo.
Then, I crossed the table to join the early team at JetBlue. We proved the commodity thinking of legacy carriers wrong. We built more than a better product: we built a better world for customers to inhabit. JetBlue succeeded because we made 'coach service that doesn't suck' an aspirational thing before customers had language for wanting it. We created cultural mythology around deserving dignity in air travel.
The legacy carriers were fit for a commodity world. We built a world where dignity was the baseline.
For Circular Transformation
In both cases, the incumbents were optimized for the wrong problem.
This is where reverse engineering becomes essential. In Strategic Reverse Engineering, I explored how Roger Martin's What Would Have To Be True methodology helps organizations escape these fitness traps. Instead of asking 'How do we adapt our current capabilities?' you ask: 'What would have to be true for circular business models to be better than linear ones?'
The answer reveals what 'fit for purpose' actually means in the Circular Century. And often, it requires abandoning the very capabilities that made you dominant in the Linear Century.
Welcome to Our Operation Dynamo
This brings us back to the Circular Transformation.
We are currently waiting for the "Royal Navy" of global corporations to bring their best to the planetary crisis. We expect them to redesign supply chains, eliminate waste, and reverse carbon emissions overnight. But their "keels" run too deep. They are fit for extraction. They are not fit for regeneration.
What is needed is the modern equivalent of 1,000 valiant Little Ships. That is worth more than a million carbon-neutral OKRs. Circular transformation won't come from institutional doctrine. It will come from distributed action.
I am interested in the archetype that Mark Rylance's character in Dunkirk portrays. He is a civilian mariner with a pleasure craft. No fuss. No heroics. Just a man who understood that his boat was fit for the moment in a way the destroyer was not.
The Little Ships succeeded not despite their small size but because of it. They were fit for purpose in ways the mighty destroyers could never be. The Circular Century will be built the same way—not by retrofitting the giants, but by launching the thousand boats. By going to war with the navy we have.
Finding Your Boat
The implication for us—for the readers of this Letter, for the strategists, for the entrepreneurs—is uncomfortable but liberating.
We cannot wait for the big ships to retrofit themselves.
If you are working in this space, you have to ask yourself: What is my boat?
For years, I tried to help steer the destroyers. But I realized that my specific set of skills—strategy, entrepreneurship, empathy for the underserved—is a shallow-draft vessel. I sense the nuances that big organizations are incentivized to miss. I can help leaders navigate the shallows where the real friction of transformation happens.
This is why I call the premium tier of this publication Dynamo. It is not a velvet rope; it is a homage to that Tiny Armada.
Operation Dynamo succeeded because of about 850 to 1,000 civilian boats. That is the goal of this practice: to find and serve 1,000 people who are ready to put their boats in the water.
The Circular Century will not be ushered in by a single legislative act or a corporate decree. It will be built by the thousand small boats—the startups, the internal changemakers, the policy hackers—who are fit for the purpose of building a better future.
The Say–Do Gap is real. But it is not a failure of customer will. It is a failure of institutional fit. The big ships are stuck. The water is shallow.
And the relief—the real relief—is looking out and seeing that the thousand boats are already in the water. You just need to find yours and launch it.
The rest of this essay explores how to identify your specific "boat"—the craft that makes you fit for circular transformation—plus practitioner insights on building the civilian navy we need.
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