Nature's
Playbook
Use nature’s billions of years of experimentation to rethink how a circular economy could work for all.
Why Living Systems?
Circular economy thinking often focuses on materials, products, and resource flows. Ecology offers a wider lens. Living systems are shaped by interdependence, adaptation, diversity, feedback, and continual change: qualities that are equally relevant when organisations are trying to redesign complex economic systems.
Nature’s Playbook draws on ecological metaphors to help people step outside familiar ways of thinking about circularity. By looking at how living systems respond to disruption, build resilience, organise relationships, and make use of available resources, one can question existing assumptions and explore ideas that might otherwise be overlooked.
The aim is to strengthen systems thinking and open up new possibilities for business models, value chains, and organisational practice. Ecology is used here not as a blueprint, but as a source of prompts for imagining more regenerative and resilient forms of value creation.
The Ecosystem
Nature’s Playbook is a growing collection of tools and resources for ecological design thinking for a circular economy. Grounded in extensive academic research, it helps people apply insights from living systems in their practice.
Each resource offers a different way to engage: from hands-on prompts and observation exercises to deeper guided reflection on a real circular economy challenge. Together, they form a learning ecosystem for anyone looking to rethink how value, relationships, materials, and responsibility circulate.
About the Author
Dr Emma Fromberg is a circular economy researcher, educator, and designer whose work explores how ecological thinking can help organisations imagine more systemic, relational, and regenerative approaches to circular economy practice.
Her work on the circular economy began as the concept gained wider attention in business, policy, and design. As the idea became more mainstream, she became increasingly interested in whether circular economy thinking genuinely challenges the logic of the linear economy, or whether it risks reproducing it in new forms.
This question has shaped her teaching and research across institutions including the University of Cambridge, the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, Delft University of Technology, and King’s College London. During her doctoral research, Emma explored the metaphors used to imagine a circular economy, with a particular focus on how ecological metaphors can support more systemic, relational, and regenerative approaches to business.
Nature’s Playbook emerged from this research. It is grounded in the belief that the ideas we develop for the future economy are shaped by perspective: by what we value, but also by what we overlook. Emma’s work invites professionals to reflect critically on how they think about organisations, value, and change, and to explore how insights from living systems can open up new possibilities for circular economy practice.