Transformative Ends, Incremental Means?
I've been told that a question comes up with increasing regularity among professionals in the circularity community: would a hybrid approach be preferable to radical transformation?
It's a reasonable question. Transformation hurts. It disrupts what's working. It asks people to abandon competencies they've spent careers developing.
An incremental approach layering circular practices onto existing operations might appear prudent. Achievable, even.
But the hybrid approach won’t work. Here's why.
Einstein’s admonition
The partially apocryphal statement attributed to Einstein is:
“Problems cannot be solved at the level of thinking that created them.”
The linear economy created the problems that circularity aims to solve: resource depletion, externalized costs, extraction of all kinds that has led to enshittification everywhere.
Sustaining innovation within linear models doesn't address these problems. It refines ad absurdum the engine that produces them.
Each incremental improvement makes the next incremental improvement more appealing than real change. This is how path dependency works. You're choosing a trajectory instead of a tactic. And the trajectory of linear optimization leads somewhere specific: toward a more efficient version of what's already failing.
Zeno's paradox of Achilles against the tortoise illustrates the folly of depending exclusively on incremental improvement. If you keep halving the distance to your goal, you approach it infinitely without ever arriving.
By aiming close to, but never squarely at, a categorically different outcome, the hybrid approach cannot cross the threshold. To cross the finish line, you have to get radical.
The commoditization is coming
We're entering an era of increasingly perfect information, delivered immediately and personally. Anything that can be modeled will be modeled. Look at what companies like System are doing: applying immense computational power to “create the first systems model of the world.” Does anyone doubt that goal is suddenly within reach?
The building blocks of incremental improvement are about to become thoroughly commoditized. Best practices, efficiency hacks, market data down to the individual—all will be available to anyone with the resources to implement what the models recommend. When everyone can optimize, optimization ceases to differentiate.
What remains scarce?
- Imagination: the capacity to conceive what doesn't yet exist.
- Empathy: the capacity to feel what others need before they can articulate it.
These cannot be modeled because they generate the new rather than optimizing the known. They're the source code, not the output.
Circular transformation requires both. Sustaining innovation requires neither. This is the structural reality that hybrid approaches fail to overcome.
It’s too late for the hybrid approach
The case against hybrid isn't that incremental progress is wrong. It's that incremental progress within linear systems perpetuates the conditions that make the destination invisible.
Linear metrics evaluate opportunities against existing norms. Circular opportunities exist outside those norms. They require different ways of seeing, measuring, and valuing. You can't measure your way to what you can't imagine. And linear systems have been systematically designed to eliminate imagination from the places where it could have impact.
Transcending this trap in the manner Einstein suggested requires a shift in mindset, not skills. It's structural. Performance management that makes organizations efficient blinds them to possibilities that don't fit existing categories. Julian Bleecker's mission "to make imagination respectable in business again" names the deficit. The word "again" tells you what has been lost.
What transformation makes possible
Those are the sticks of the argument. Here come the carrots.
Abundant lives in an imaginative ecosystem. Circular transformation doesn't require sacrifice. It enables extraction-free abundance; lifestyles in harmony with natural systems rather than in opposition to them. It “husbands,” in Clay Christensen’s use of the word, the capacities that will remain scarce commodities: imagination, empathy, the ability to feel and respond to what's needed. An economy that develops these capacities rather than eliminating them is an economy worth building.
Ateliers of democracy. John Hench, Disney's legendary designer, called his approach "the architecture of reassurance.” He designed environments that communicate care. Every detail says: you're in good hands, we've anticipated your needs, you can trust this experience. Circular economy can deliver this at scale. Imagine Hermès-level craftsmanship, distinction, and relationship with the customer—but accessible like the old automat was. Not luxury for the few or commodity for the many. Quality of care as the baseline. This is what becomes possible when you stop optimizing for extraction and start designing for relationship. (More on this in future essays.)
Reconciliation with “the horror of existence.” Joseph Campbell identified this as a pillar of mythological function: every culture needs a way to make peace with mortality, suffering, entropy. The linear economy's answer is accumulation: acquire enough surplus to insulate yourself from vulnerability. It doesn't work. You can't stockpile your way out of impermanence. Try as we might.
The circular economy offers a different answer: participate in flows that continue beyond you. Contribute to systems that regenerate. Find meaning not in what you accumulate but in what you enable. Solving this ancient anxiety is a worthy place to spend the abundance that's coming.
Seeing is leading
We're so used to transformative change being thrust upon us for unsympathetic reasons. Restructuring that destroys livelihoods. Disruption that serves shareholders while displacing workers. It’s the story of the planned highway going through grandmother’s house, over and over.
“Transformation" has earned its reputation as the euphemism for extraction with new branding. But this time can be different.
It's understandable that most people can't see what circular transformation makes possible. The pattern-matching says: this is another version of that. Another story about change that benefits someone else.
It's not. The ability to see, act, and communicate what circular transformation makes possible so others can see it is what leadership in this era requires. Hybrid competencies are not enough. You can't half-see a different future.
Einstein's level shift; Zeno's finish line; Campbell's reconciliation. All require crossing a threshold that incremental progress approaches but never reaches.
The question isn't whether to transform. It's whether to lead the transformation or be transformed by it.
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