Circular Futures

Enabling visionary foresight and strategic advantage for organisations transitioning to the circular economy 

Strategic Foresight & Compliance

The circular economy requires a mixture of vision and action. We offer unique Board, Executive and Leadership training workshops designed to activate circular solutions through strategic foresight.

Our collaborative approach to envisaging your role within the circular economy helps your leadership team identify how your specific context enables your business to respond to the growing demand for circular solutions. From compiling with the new EU regulations to following the ISO standards, we ensure you are ready and empowered to take significant circular action.


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Circular Design & Innovation

The circular economy adds value to your business, improves sustainability, and enables you to have longer and stronger relationships with your clients. Are you ready to ensure you are part of this global business transformation?

Our comprehensive innovation and design workshops equip your Design, Engineering, Marketing and Business Development teams with the skills they need to activate the circular economy within your business, respond to the best international practices, adopt the latest science and be ready to take on new markets.

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Circular Design Futuring

Unlock the full potential of the circular economy with our futuring sessions. These deep-dive creative explorations enable your team to envisage the next 3-5 years of your circular development, identify the stakeholders and partners who will help you be successful, and overcome barriers.

Envisage the impossible and push the boundaries of what your team can achieve through an expansive workshop utilising our futures toolbox to create the business design solutions that will bring your circular ambitions to life.

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Co-Creating a Circular Economy

Experience a unique and transformative journey where we help you co-create a clear and achievable pathway towards a sustainable future.

We help you unlock your company’s potential to be a leader in the circular economy with our unique strategic foresight and design futuring process. Allow your visionary ideas to take flight and become reality.

Facilitation and Transformative Experiences

Circular Futures has a unique process to support any sized company from any industry sector to explore and envisage how they can successfully enter or transition to the Circular Economy (CE).

Drawing on the frameworks outlined in the new ISO 59000 standards for activating the circular economy, we ensure that you are exposed to the latest science, practices and processes from business design to CE indicators, measurement and reporting.

Hands-on, productive, and often described as transformative, our workshops and immersive facilitation processes enable leaders to grasp the possibilities, design the products of tomorrow and ensure that they are up-to-speed with the latest regulatory, customer and cultural trends that are driving the CE transition globally.

We offer bespoke workshops and can be engaged to design and facilitate in-house transition processes, train staff and consult executive teams. We also offer strategic advice, regulatory compliance, conduct research and advise on policy development around the CE transition.

To rapidly upskill workforces, we have an online corporate Circular Economy training platform.

The Circular Futures Toolbox

  • The circular economy is a transition from the old linear model of extraction and exploitation to a sustainable, regenerative and circular economy by design. The core goals are to eliminate waste, make things last longer, and regenerate nature. To achieve this we need to redesign business models, reimagine consumption and transform our values. The vision and mission of Circular Futures is to expand and activate the circular economy by offering cutting-edge processes of envisaging the innovation, business models and policy landscape that will unlock the potential for a restorative and regenerative Circular Economy.

  • Can you imagine the circular future you are working towards? By using strategic foresight, you can unlock the blocks and barriers to achieving the impossible. This method takes a systems approach to push beyond the obvious horizon and explore multiple future scenarios. Strategic foresight is best used in situations where uncertainty is high; as an action-oriented approach, it enables multiple future scenarios to be mapped out and pathways to achieving them to be unblocked. Combined with our full toolset, strategic foresight is the foundation for any company, organisation or government transitioning to the circular economy.

  • A process of envisioning the future now and creating the artefacts, innovations, policies and scenarios in which the envisaged future can become a reality, design futuring draws on breakthrough innovation, scenario building, visioning, systems thinking and backcasting to reverse engineer the process of achieving an imagined future. By creating your ideal versions of the future, you can then establish the tangible pathway to get from the current state to the desired outcome. We integrate this into our workshops to ensure that visionary and boundary-pushing ideas are considered in the mix of viable futures. This is not just for designers or creatives — it's for anyone who has the desire to push past the ordinary and design entirely new outcomes.

  • Backcasting is a planning method that enables a future scenario to be reverse-engineered to ensure that the key touchpoints are identified and achieved when moving to the desired outcome. Once future scenarios are envisaged and desired outcomes are set, backcasting is used to map the process from the current status quo to achieve the new future. All of the needed actions are identified and a logic for sucess is set. It aligns everyone to the task at hand and ensures that any needed changes to policy, innovation, technology, etc. are identified and invested in.

  • CoDesign is a well-established process of designing or “co-creating” with the key stakeholders. The stakeholders are often those who will be the beneficiaries of, or directly affected by the outcome of your actions (be it a product, policy, process or service). By including key stakeholders, you are ensuring that the outcomes are connected to the context in which it will exist and ensuring that people are invited rather than instructed to be included. This is connected to participatory action research, and at Circular Futures, we have vast intercultural experience in applying co-design successfully.

  • Circular systems thinking shifts the way we approach these problems from issues to opportunities because it enables us to see the full picture before the parts, and the relationships that reinforce the problems are identified so that effective interventions can be implemented to shift their status quo. It’s generative, approaching the problem from the positive possibility that all systems hold their own solutions and that by exploring the system that sustains the current status quo, we can unlock the potential to create a new system.

Circular Futures supports businesses, NFPs and organisations of all sizes to transition to the circular economy through a unique strategic foresight and design futuring process that enables visionary ideas to become reality.

Pioneering the Circular Transition

For over two decades, our founder Dr. Leyla Acaroglu has been pioneering systems and science-based transformation to a sustainable, regenerative and circular future.

Named Champion of the Earth by the United Nations Environment Programme for her pioneering work with the UnSchool and her ability to translate science-based sustainability into tangible actions for change, Leyla is a LinkedIn Changemaker and instructor with tens of thousands of people completing her highly effective training courses.

She is an advisor to governments, top tire businesses, NFPs and executives including; Adobe, BMW, ING, Decathlon, HP, American Express, Avery Dennison and Heineken to name just a few. She is often invited to provide her expertise to the media such as ABC, Q&A and Reuters, The New York Times.

As a leading voice in the power of design and systems thinking as tools for transformation, she has been invited to do several TED talks and keynotes all over the world, including WCEF, Ellen MacArthur Foundation, UNEA4, The RSA and Google.

Leyla created the Circular Futures Process as a way of leveling up the business community and supporting the rapid transition to a circular economy by design.

Unlock the strategic advantage that well-design circular solutions enable, stay ahead of the trends and have cutting-edge research inform how you respond to this global movement away from linear and wasteful, to circular and sustainable.

Ready to Uncover Your Circular Futures?