Today I’m headed south.

Today I’m headed south. Down to London to run a workshop on the circular economy for Nottingham University. The irony is that Nottingham is only 20 miles from where I live but that they and I head for London. The irony really is that I can travel the 100 miles to London faster than I can travel to Nottingham. Weird world. Anyway, that’s beside the point. I’m running this workshop for probably the 30th time. I know it backwards. It’s good. It also changes a little each time. Evolution.

I was thinking “why the heck are you doing this again Shayler?” Surely the circular economy is old news. Or just another trinket in the jewellery box of corporate bollocks (as I normally say)? Well, yes it probably is. It has probably become an excuse to do little while sounding like you’re doing a lot. But I still love it. I love it because it genuinely does threaten to change the status quo. To kick business in the bum and shout “sort it out”. But probably not in its own. Luckily it’s not. . Luckily the world is changing faster than Usain Bolt runs the 100m.

There are a number of radical changes that will shift corporate power, customer perceptions and the way we see business, resources and stuff. The circular economy is in there. But so too is the sharing economy. Currently worth $15 billion it will rise to $300 billion in ten years or so. Wow. Hard for the tax collectors to track but also hard for our brand and asset driven world to understand and exploit. Add to that our changing relationship with stuff (millennials are less interested in owning things than any previous generation in the last 100 years), the rise of start-ups and start-up thinking, the collapse in value of traditional degrees, changed employment preferences (think life of jobs not job for life), and the rise of the blended consumer (wearing Prada and primark, shopping at Waitrose and Aldi). These trends (and there are many more) make for less certainty, greater threats for businesses and brands (did you know that in the UK brand assets are now worth more than physical assets? Weird), and an enhanced need to think with agility and move nimbly.

So what’s all this got to do with my workshop? Well, I’ve been taking stuff apart and working out how to redesign it with less environmental impact for 19 years. That’s a long time. In that time I’ve changed what I do. I now spend more time looking at the broader problem rather than the flawed design response. This allows participants to see the product in context. It allows a wider consideration of how to solve a problem. But that’s not all. I work more on more on the development of alternative business and ownership models. This is where the gold is. This is what the big companies are scared of. I work on purpose. I disrupt current thinking and business models. This is scary for lots of companies but they have no choice. The big supermarkets cannot continue to grow a business that makes customers fat and ill and that hurts their supply-chains. Electronics companies cannot continue to take resources from the ground that do harm where they come from and are addictive where they are used.

So I love this workshop even though I’ve done it 30 times because each time is different. Each group thinks in a different way and develops ideas that take my breath away.

I just stand there and conduct.