Frameworks and Change London 6 th June Ken Webster and Craig Johnson (Ellen MacArthur Foundation)

Frameworks and Change

London 6th June

Ken Webster and Craig Johnson

(Ellen MacArthur Foundation)

We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims.R. Buckminster Fuller

“I have a high regard for metaphor. It is the way we come to understand the world” Ian McGilchrist.

The mind is inherently embodied.Thought is mostly unconscious. Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical.

George Lakoff

The world as mechanismUnderstandablePredictableControllable

Linear

Nature as resource and waste dump

The triumph of the rational economic individualThe rise of the specialistMarkets as arbitersCompetition as primary

Money as value

Systemic stress

… a response to a troublesome linear economy?

or variations on business as usual but greener and fairer?

End of the line?

• Maximum oil output nearby - ‘peak oil’

•Rising trend materials prices

•Systemic stress - biodiversity, water , food, materials, population etc

•Climate change

A Changed Worldview?

• If the machine inspired the industrial age, the image of the living system may inspire a genuine postindustrial age,’ say Peter Senge et al., in Sloan Management Review.

• You never change things by fighting against the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the old model obsolete. - Buckminster Fuller

Let’s think of a cherry tree

Circular Economy framework

Some key principles:• Waste=Food (Technical and Biological

nutrient cycles)• Energy should come from renewable

sources• Diversity is strength• Systems thinking

Circular Economy design (eg Transport and Food systems)

A circular economy is not about objects its about systems

thinking in systems and cycles, we become metabolistsGunter Pauli