Steve Agi raised something this morning about the circular economy: the design problem is largely solved. The coordination problem isn't.
We see this constantly in material flow systems. The biology works. The logistics work. The offtake relationships exist. But the intelligence layer connecting them — the one that tells you what's moving, where, at what quality, and who needs it — is almost always missing or manual.
Three things that break circular systems at scale:
→ Traceability gaps: material provenance gets lost at the first handoff
→ Timing mismatches: supply and demand signals don't reach each other fast enough to act on
→ Incentive opacity: the value of the circular loop isn't visible to the people who need to change behaviour
The fix isn't another platform. It's a coordination architecture that sits underneath the existing systems and makes them legible to each other.
What's the coordination bottleneck you keep running into?