Welcome back to The Ledger - a weekly briefing at the intersection of business, sustainability, technology and systems thinking. Let’s get straight into Issue #6.
The Big Idea: The Nowhere Loop
Most people think of pilots as a runway. Small, controlled, then - if successful - ready to take off into scale.
But in reality, many pilots don’t fly anywhere. They circle endlessly, consuming time, talent and capital, only to land back where they started.
That’s The Nowhere Loop.
What makes the Nowhere Loop dangerous isn’t just inertia. It’s that it gives the illusion of progress while institutionalising:
Decision theatre - leadership can point to “activity” without making real commitments.
Satisfying psychology - success in a narrow context becomes a substitute for systemic change.
Capital erosion - investors see pilots as noise because they can’t benchmark results across projects.
Strategic amnesia - each loop creates its own dataset, but no common language to compare, validate or transfer.
From all of my recent conversations with people across industries, it’s clear that pilots don’t fail to scale because they’re bad. They fail to scale because they’re designed not to.
The very architecture of most pilots - bespoke metrics, bespoke teams, bespoke finance - locks them in place.
Escaping the Nowhere Loop requires designing pilots as proto-standards:
Treat a pilot as a unit test for a system, not a one-off project.
Build finance-grade measurement into the first trial so it can carry credibility forward.
Judge success not on novelty or local fit, but on portability across assets, geographies, and portfolios.
Above all: treat the pilot not as proof of concept, but as proof of repeatability.
That shift - from “can this work here?” to “can this work everywhere?” - is the difference between circling forever and building momentum that compounds.
The Nowhere Loop wastes the most precious thing of all: the energy needed to reach escape velocity.
Signals from the Noise
What matters, what works and what’s worth watching.
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⚡ Hydrogen pilots abound, but lock-in persists
Hundreds of hydrogen pilot projects are underway across Europe, yet fewer than 10% show signs of scaling into industrial baseload. Bespoke economics and site-specific subsidies keep them looping.
🔗 IEA Hydrogen Projects Database
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🏭 CCUS: trapped in the demonstration zone
Carbon capture and storage has lived in pilot-land for 20 years. Without shared metrics and finance-grade validation, projects remain stuck in bespoke loops.
🔗 Global CCS Institute 2024 Status Report
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💸 Investors call time on “pilot fatigue”
LPs in climate funds are pressing GPs for clearer frameworks to distinguish repeatable models from endless pilots. The Nowhere Loop is starting to erode credibility at fund level.
🔗 Financial Times on climate fund scrutiny
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🌍 Policy caught in trial cycles
National strategies often showcase pilot projects but rarely fund the transition to standards. Without frameworks to move from pilot to mandate, policies reinforce the Nowhere Loop.
🔗 European Commission Industrial Strategy
From the Ground
A strategy lead at a global industrials firm put it bluntly last week:
“We’ve done 20 pilots in the last five years. Not one has gone global across our sites. Plants have no incentive to make a pilot work anywhere but their own site.”
The Ledger Line
The Nowhere Loop isn’t a failure of innovation. It’s the architecture of pilots themselves.
End Note
If the last decade was the age of the pilot, the next must be the age of the pattern.
The only projects worth doing are the ones that make scaling inevitable.
If this struck a chord, please share it with someone who’s tired of watching theatre when we need transformation.
Or reply and let me know: have you come across The Nowhere Loop? Have you overcome it? I read every one.
Here’s to what’s possible.
Dom