On Circularity

There was an interesting session I was at yesterday, on circularity. Got me thinking about what it means to us.

A few hundred thousand years ago, before agriculturists — or humans altogether — messed around with them, plants were anyway producing seeds and as a means to attract dispersers etc, food in a cycle of life’s continuity and many other life forms benefited from the built in urge to perpetuate life. Circularity always existed, with an overall increase in abundance over time. There was also an overall increase in entropy, some “downsizing” every few million years and a restart of the cycle using the same raw material. Circular again.

We came in, needed and observed the floral cycles, and decided to optimize on fruit quantity, size, taste, colour etc (with some downsides for the floral cycles in terms of resilience and evolutionary experimentation).

When we created the structures that run businesses today, and helped them optimize for ever-shorter cycles exploiting and even disrupting larger, long term cycles to accrue value in our mythical currency terms, we were still seeking circularity in those shorter cycles, blind to the disruption of those longer cycles.

It’s finally about what we’re able to observe, what we decide to, or even want to, observe and then account for. It’s the trade-offs we’re ok making to try maximize on certain outcomes and numbers we care about, and the costs we’re ready to bear in the longer cycles. Circularity always exists — it’s just the length of the cycles that we play around with, or are unable to see and account for. Over time, we’ve made more and more trade-offs that disrupt the circularity that matters to us across even a couple of 100 years, and now even within a lifespan — junk food, digital overdose and so on.

It’s this ability to observe, understand and then make better trade-offs that’ll get us out of the abyss we’re already in, in many ways. Irrespective of whether we call it mitigation, or adaptation, or resilience or whatever term we throw at it next. It’s innately a better understanding of the next level of longer term circularity, and accounting for it such that we don’t knowingly keep breaking what works in our favour.

In other words, while we have gained a lot more data and information, what we now need a lot more wisdom.