Introduction to Circudyne

Wrapping up our first quarterly series exploring circular transformation as systematic competitive advantage. What it takes for brands to think broader, look further, and summon the courage to build a future for everyone to look forward to.
Hudson River School landscape painting of sustainable community with solar-paneled buildings, cyclists, electric streetcar, and electric cars in golden valley with distant mountains"
Broad, sunlit circular uplands. Image generated by GPT-5

Summer 2025 series conclusion

When I started the Circudyne Letter, the question arose of how to organize it thematically. That’s one of the challenges of examining circular transformation. It’s a big subject. How does one break it down into bite-size bits?

The calendar conveniently breaks 52 weeks into four 13-week seasons, providing time for 12 primary letters plus a summary for each series.

As this is the thirteenth letter, we’re wrapping up the first quarterly series. The theme of this one was presenting core themes of the practice: Introduction to Circudyne.

The objective of our practice is to contribute to the adoption of circularity by brands, for everyone’s sake. That’s why this series was structured as it was:

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Next week marks the beginning of our next series: A Circudyne Odyssey — a voyage through the ideas of strategists, philosophers, and other thinkers that continue to shape our mission.

Onto our summary:

Circularity as transformation objective

In Circularity is Lean 2.0, we argued that circular transformation resembles the fundamentals of Lean, and should be understood (and packaged) as its successor. Like Lean, circularity can be expected to offer systematic competitive advantage for its pioneers.

Circularity is Lean 2.0: Business Case for Transformation
Circular transformation follows Toyota’s Lean playbook: systematic waste elimination creates sustained competitive advantage beyond operational gains.

Circudynamics: a transformation architecture

In The Art and Science of Circular Transformation, we introduced Circudynamics, an architecture for effective change.

The Art and Science of Circular Transformation
Introducing Circudynamics: systematic integration of strategy, worldbuilding, technology, culture & brand for circular transformation advantage.

Horizons: an alternative strategic perspective

In Strategic Reverse Engineering, we acknowledged that the key difference from Lean was that there was no circular Toyota to copy, and introduced a strategic affordance to compensate.

Strategic Reverse Engineering for Circular Transformation
Circular transformation has no exemplar to copy. Success requires imaginative courage to envision new realities and reverse-engineer pathways to them.

Living Futures: dwelling on a street corner of the future, today

In The Worldbuilding Advantage, we complemented that strategic affordance with a better way to navigate undiscovered country like our circular future.

Worldbuilding for Circular Transformation | Circudynamics
Worldbuilding creates experiential prototypes of circular futures, releasing emotional energy that powers transformation beyond logic.

Catalysts: technology enablers

In When Technology Converges, the subject turned to better understanding the role technology plays in the process of strategy, and how to tame it.

Technology Convergence Makes Circular Transformation Viable
The convergence is technological and strategic. Mature and emerging technologies make circular transformation strategically viable.

Connection: group dynamics of change

In Building Cultural Momentum, we covered the tragically overlooked need for public understanding of circularity as lifestyle, and proposed a way to achieve it.

Building Cultural Momentum: The Connection Domain
Cultural mythology shapes what people want more than rational analysis. We adopt behaviors and identities by watching others embody them successfully. Shared experiences accelerate the cultural momentum that makes circularity feel inevitable.

Craft: the integrated enterprise

In The Element of Integration, the topic turned to why circular solutions call for an all-of-enterprise approach. Recalling my fondest brush with greatness, we used Apple as a lens for understanding the benefits of functional organization.

The Element of Integration: Crafting Circular Advantage
In which we use Apple as a lens to understand the power of treating brand, strategy, and organization as a single unit. Circular business models require this same unified approach to succeed—tomorrow’s integrated firms will represent an evolutionary step beyond today’s models.

A peek into our circular future

Next followed a mini-series of four essays on lifestyles from a circular tomorrow.

Appreciating abundance

In The Technology of Matter, we explored post-scarcity economics and the conditions for sustainable abundance.

The Technology of Matter
Finite materials can create infinite value when orchestrated as renewable technology rather than depleted as resource. The circular abundance paradox solved.

Consumption in a circular world

In A Future To Look Forward To, we accept the advice of David Foster Wallace and examine our objective reality, and compare it to the potential for something better to strive towards.

A Future To Look Forward To
The linear economy traps us in novelty, obsolescence, and extraction. Circular systems offer liberation: more wealth, more beauty, more meaning.

The beauty of circular solutions

In Systemic Beauty: The How of Building Desire, we further examine the idea of beauty in a post-scarcity context, and acknowledge the need for it to make circular solutions effective.

Systemic Beauty
Explore how “Systemic Beauty” makes circular futures aspirational—where coherence, legibility, and cool replace wasteful novelty.

Infrastructure for a circular world

In Building Circular Ecosystems, we examined the nature of infrastructure aggregators, and considered the intergenerational symbiosis between them and future innovators, drawing natural comparisons to circular transformation.

Building Circular Ecosystems: Infrastructure for the Future
Every leap grows from the foundations others have laid. Breakthroughs flourish when vision meets the rails of yesterday’s visionaries. Today, the circular economy can move beyond pilots and projects to build the shared systems that unlock regenerative abundance for all.

We’ve done this before (we’ll do it again)

In The Road to a Circular Future Runs Through Brands, we use the 1939 World’s Fair to understand how brands provide feedstock for cultural mythology. Properly inspired, the audience of 45 million people took the ingredients brands offered there and whipped up a dream and turned it into a reality in less than a generation. The consequence: iconic brands, better living, and a dominant global culture.

Brands once built the American Dream. Now they must build the Circular Century.
From the 1939 World’s Fair to the Circular Century, brands must stage the future and make circularity our shared dream.

Parting thought

We hope that somewhere in the course of this series that our readers have found strength: to think broader, to look further, and summon the courage to act.

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The Circudyne Letter returns next week with an analysis of our favorite strategic provocation: what would have to be true?
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