The Worldbuilding Advantage
Navigate, Don’t Iterate, To Your North Star
Last week, I introduced the business case for considering circular transformation as Lean 2.0, ending with the promise to explore how to "put your customers on the street corner in your circular future." Several readers asked about this worldbuilding reference—what it means and why it's essential for circular transformation success. That's why I'm writing this third Circudyne Letter on The Worldbuilding Advantage: Navigate, Don’t Iterate, To Your North Star. Before diving into the specific domains of Circudynamics in coming weeks, it's crucial to understand why worldbuilding serves as the emotional catalyst that makes all other transformation work possible.
Every brand faces the same challenge: filling the cultural mythology gap that determines whether people see you as essential or irrelevant.
The easy, and by now standard, path uses jingles, celebrity collaborations, or other whizzy gizmos.
But there is something far more powerful.
Think about the marketing that has changed culture. Coca-Cola's Hilltop ad didn't sell soda—it showed a microcosm of a healed society. Apple's 1984 commercial didn't explain computers—it hinted at liberation from gray dystopia. The "Think Different" campaign depicted zero computers—as it reacquainted us with the value of genius, reminding us that “the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”
These brands filled the cultural mythology gap with complete visions that resolved deep societal contradictions. They created believable worlds where their solutions made sense.
Introduction to Worldbuilding
Worldbuilding synthesizes influences from cinema, theater, theme parks, and video games—disciplines that require immersive experiences to tell stories. As Alex McDowell, the pioneer production designer who captured worldbuilding in a bottle and gave it a name, discovered: the story and the world are co-created. The story populates the world, and the world advances the story.
The process begins by assembling a think tank of subject matter experts to build out world elements that advance a specific narrative. In the case of brands, this narrative is a strategic element, like Roger Martin's "Winning Aspiration." For circular transformation, it might take the shape of something like "what if our brand played a fundamental role in a circular future that was aspirational and delightful?"
The facilitator's role is to set ground rules and pose provocative questions that create productive friction between different subject matter experts. As the process unfolds, group curiosity overtakes individual ego. The world begins to emerge not from any single perspective, but from the collision of expertise across disciplines.
The task is complete when participants share the feeling of knowing what it's like "to live on a street corner in the world," as McDowell puts it. Once formed and connected, the story/strategy and world advance and grow together. Each provides a point of reference and inspiration for the other as they evolve.
Worldbuilding is a historical key ingredient of transformation that has been left out of circularity playbooks. That is a crippling oversight, because the circular economy represents a step change from our current reality.
Its absence on the scene explains why circular initiatives fail to excite genuine customer demand. This in turn leaves executives wondering why consumers claim to want sustainability but won't pay for it.
This leads to post-mortem analysis prescribing “consumer education.” Worldbuilding does more than educate. It immerses its subject in a holistically rendered reality. Created with intention and good taste, the built world tantalizes its audience, overcoming behavioral biases rooted in conservatism and fear.
Circular transformation isn't incremental improvement—it's a state change into undiscovered country. The incrementalist approach provides A/B test results that optimize within existing paradigms. That’s the wrong set of navigation tools for this territory.
Which would you prefer to have in new territory: an unending series of binary test results, or a treasure map?
When brands are performing at their best, they fill the gap between how people actually live and how they want to live. In the context of circular transformation, there are no totems to borrow. We live in a linear world. Our circular world lies in the future. Therefore an authentic mythology about circular solutions has to be built.
Worldbuilding provides both the navigation tools for transformation and a nutritionally complete cultural mythology that creates authentic competitive advantage.
Worldbuilding creates complete experiential worlds where circular solutions feel natural, desirable, and inevitable. The vision is credible because it demonstrates how circular abundance actually works. That believability activates an emotional response.
We call this domain Living Futures because it doesn't just describe what could be—it creates experiences where people can actually live in those futures before they exist. These aren't static visions but dynamic worlds that breathe with possibility.
I'm amazed this approach hasn't yet been applied at scale for circular transformation, because it offers five systematic advantages:
First, worldbuilding releases emotional energy that powers unified vision between teams and stakeholders while shifting demand in a public hungry for a better world. When people experience circular abundance, they develop emotional desire that transcends intellectual acceptance.
Second, worldbuilding accesses authentic sources of comparative advantage and unique capabilities within organizations. It reveals what makes a brand see and behave like people, not a monolith with a logo. This authenticity has incalculable value and resonance. It is hard for competitors to replicate what emerges from your organization's genuine culture and capabilities.
Third, worldbuilding is simultaneously competitive and cooperative. It stokes the fires of creativity when different experts participate in the process and generates unpredictable output that no single discipline could create alone. The best insights emerge from the collision of perspectives.
Fourth, worldbuilding operates as a simultaneous process, just like Roger Martin's Strategy Choice Cascade. Teams can work on strategy, operations, and culture simultaneously because they share a coherent vision of where they're going.
Fifth, the world that's built—and the "street corner" you put participants into—adds a new dimension to your brand. It unifies and informs. It inspires and sells. It becomes the organizing principle that makes all other business decisions clearer and more powerful.
So What?
For Business Leaders:
Worldbuilding isn't creative luxury—it's competitive necessity for circular transformation. When you're asking customers to abandon familiar linear solutions for circular alternatives they've never experienced, explanation isn't enough. You need experiential prototyping that lets them feel what circular abundance is like.
This creates the treasure map you need for undiscovered country. Traditional market research tells you how to optimize within existing paradigms. Worldbuilding reveals entirely new value propositions that emerge when circular solutions meet genuine human needs.
The cultural mythology you create becomes a moat that competitors struggle to cross. They can copy your features, but they can't replicate the authentic world that emerged from your organization's unique culture and capabilities.
For Innovation Leaders:
Worldbuilding solves the fundamental paradox of circular innovation: customers can't want what they can't see, but they need to experience benefits before you can create solutions at scale.
I experienced this power firsthand during a worldbuilding session I facilitated for Super South, a regional sustainability conference held in Atlanta earlier this year. The goal was to create "a delightful day in 2035 in a world that was circular and distinctively Southern." What surprised me wasn't just the quality of ideas that emerged—it was the release of positive emotion in the room.
Worldbuilding doesn't just build a substrate for imaginative ideas; it also clears away the cruft of modern life that accretes when we spend too much time looking down. When people can lift their heads and envision better futures together, something profound happens. They remember why the work matters.
The process generates breakthrough insights by creating safe spaces for "what if" thinking. When teams can explore circular futures free from performance management theater, opportunities emerge that spreadsheet analysis doesn’t conjure.
Most importantly, worldbuilding enables you to identify which customer jobs-to-be-done are better served by circular solutions. It reveals the gap between desired lifestyles and existing realities, then shows how to return captured value from circular transformation back to consumers.
For Governance Leaders:
Worldbuilding provides systematic risk reduction through shared vision alignment. When leadership teams, employees, and stakeholders can all stand on the same "street corner" in your circular future, strategic decisions become clearer and execution becomes faster.
The process creates measurable business value even before products launch. Unified vision reduces internal friction, improves decision quality, and enables faster response to market changes. Roadmaps cohere. Product-market fit becomes an active verb and not merely a metric.
The worlds you build become strategic assets that appreciate over time. Unlike marketing campaigns that require constant refreshing, authentic worldbuilding deepens and strengthens as your circular solutions mature and prove the vision correct.
The rest of this essay covers practitioner insights on developing worldbuilding methodologies for circular transformation, including how to overcome resistance to experiential prototyping.