Nature's Playbook [EN 1.0]

Nature’s Playbook is a tool for ecological design thinking for a circular economy. It emerged from the doctoral research of Dr Emma Fromberg and is being developed as a spin-out from the King’s College London Centre for Sustainable Business.

Nature’s Playbook can be used in two main ways. First, it supports individual reflection and ideation, allowing users to engage quietly and deeply with complex concepts at their own pace. Second, it can be used in facilitated workshops, courses, or teaching sessions, where it acts as a structured prompt for dialogue, collective sense-making, and idea generation.

Facilitators are encouraged to engage with the tool through an official Nature’s Playbook facilitator workshop before committing to independent facilitation.

Nature’s Playbook is designed primarily for business and sustainability professionals working with real, tangible products and services. It is also well-suited to educators teaching undergraduate, postgraduate, and executive-level courses on the circular economy. The tool has been extensively developed and tested with these audiences, ensuring that it is both conceptually rigorous and practically relevant in real organisational and educational contexts.

The box contains 20 cards, including an explainer card that introduces the structure of the tool and guides users through how to engage with it. The cards are organised into three thematic groups, each focusing on a different dimension of ecological design thinking for a circular economy.

Each card explores a specific subdomain within its theme, inviting reflection and idea generation through ecological insights.

 

Theme: Dealing with wholeness

• Diversity and redundancy
• Open nutrient networks
• Ecological niche
• Experimentation and the right conditions for life
• Communities in enmeshed layers
• Emergence and gap dynamics
• Self-organisation

 

Theme: The importance of relationships

• Opportunism and enhancing utilisation
• Reciprocity and interdependency
• Cooperation and co-evolution
• Competition
• Community and information sharing
• Invasion and conflict
• Parasitical relationships

 

Theme: Responses to change

• Evolving through feedback
• Metamorphosis
• Microclimate and homeostasis
• Adaptation and seasonal changes
• Reactive change to disruption

 

Together, these themes invite users to reflect on how they currently conceptualise a circular economy and to use ecological principles both reflexively and generatively when exploring new ideas for business, education, and organisational practice.

Each card focuses on a specific phenomenon from nature and follows a deliberate, layered structure. Engagement begins with a short ecological story that invites users to pause and attend closely to how a living system functions. This first step is intentionally slow, encouraging participants to activate the cognitive pathways used to make sense of natural systems before translating insights into a business context.

When users are ready, the card is unfolded in stages. The next section introduces a prompt that explicitly connects the ecological insight to business, inviting reflection on products, services, business models, value chains, and the wider economy. This is followed by a set of “think-of” prompts designed to stimulate ideation and support the generation of multiple ideas and directions. Each card also includes a real-world example, not as a blueprint or best practice, but as a tangible illustration that can provoke discussion, critique, or productive discomfort. Finally, a broader reflective question encourages synthesis and can be used for individual contemplation or plenary discussion in group settings.

Through this structure, Nature’s Playbook does not provide answers, checklists, or ready-made solutions. Instead, it creates the conditions for users to question assumptions, explore complexity, and develop ideas grounded in ecological thinking while remaining relevant to real organisational contexts.