Kalle reflects, in concrete terms, on an attractive sustainable world at A.

Takeaway for Leaders at All Levels

As earlier reflections within Stepwise Global have emphasized, clever Strategic Sustainable Development (SSD) reflects enlightened self‑interest — in other words, doing well by doing good. Today we have one scientifically validated operative system that is Systemic (considering the whole world), Systematic (supporting stepwise planning where each step prepares the next), and Strategic (strengthening the bottom line from the first step). This is the ‘ABCD‑in‑Funnel’ operative system within the Framework for Strategic Sustainable Development (FSSD) [Footnote 1].

Yet despite all the success stories from businesses, municipalities, and universities applying this operative system, its diffusion remains too slow given the global urgency. Why? Because, like all complex missions in complex systems — playing chess, curing cancer, or playing football — you must do it to get it. Hearing about it or watching others is not enough to create the intuitive, practical understanding needed for strategic action, monitoring and communication.

The prevailing narrative still suggests that competitive advantage from contributing to an attractive sustainable world is naïve, rare, or only possible for others. What is missing is not theoretical weight — the perception is that true strategic sustainable development is practically impossible. This misconception persists because of longstanding, tradition‑bound flaws in education, governance, and societal design.
“We cannot do this because nobody else does it.”

Unless leaders have actively participated in ABCD workshops, confirmation biases often prevent them from even stepping into the room — a pattern well documented in our action research. The fastest progress consistently occurs where leaders are actively engaged in applying the operative system. Delegating it to middle management does not suffice.

Why Leaders Feel Stuck

Regardless of rhetoric, many top leaders feel trapped within a global governance landscape that is historically — and now obsoletely — rigged for strategic under‑performance. Innovative measures seem impossible to implement due to deep‑rooted flaws in law, policy, norms and organizational design. These flaws survived for centuries because both population levels and industrial power were vastly lower than today.

The way out of this dilemma is to choose measures that strengthen today’s bottom line while also preparing pragmatically for future steps — steps that will become unavoidable as we move deeper into the deadly funnel of unsustainability. Insightful strategists already recognize that this transition is mercilessly inevitable.

Making It Easier to Get Leaders Into the Room

Do stressed leaders really need to begin their sustainability journey by modelling their goals and targets anew within the boundary conditions? Could we combine the rules of the game by also supplying tangible, attractive examples — a kind of halfway step — that leaders can grasp more intuitively?

Yes, we can.

Researchers have begun modelling entire global life‑supporting sectors in ABCD workshops, as if they were businesses, each redesigned within the sustainability boundary conditions. These models offer concrete, scalable images of attractive futures. Organizations and regions can then relate their tailormade ABCD work to these sector‑models, to get concrete input for what is scalable versus doomed within the sectors they rely on. This makes planning easier, more inspiring, and clearer from a pedagogical standpoint.

This reflection is about exactly that.

A System‑Wide Picture of an Attractive and Scalable Global Future (See figure).

The conceptual figure that accompanies this text illustrates an overview of sectors to see what the world would look like within the boundary conditions. This overview of all sectors and how they are interdependently modelled, provides concrete input to individual ABCD analyses of organizations and regions. All to avoid stranded assets in suboptimizations and blind alleys, and innovative ideas for really scalable strategic paths. Would a certain topic or organization be particularly dependent on a certain sector, e.g. agriculture, forestry, energy, traffic, construction, materials, more in depth ABCDs of those individual sectors have also been done as further input to the ABCDs. This is not always needed, particularly not in the beginning av ABCD analyses when so much is about basic capacity building and discovering major gaps in education, sharing, policy developments and organizational planning. But later on, at more specific questions about optional smart moves to pick higher hanging fruit, it may be a good practice to download the more in-depth sector analyses as creative input to the organizational ABCD planning. To get it all in perspective, we need to merge three pieces of understanding together:

1. Thriving Forests, Oceans and Biodiversity Are Non‑Negotiable

Forests and marine ecosystems — together with their biodiversity — must remain healthy to uphold the biogeochemical cycles that sustain all life. Over billions of years, these cycles evolved to regulate climate, water, nutrients, and the composition of chemicals in the biosphere — functions essential for survival.

2. Civilization Is an Organism Embedded in Nature

Civilization emerged only about 10,000 years ago, when agriculture allowed people to settle, specialize, and collectively raise quality of life. In a systems sense, civilization behaves like a vast living organism — feeding, breathing, drinking, and emitting waste — all constrained by its environment.

Historically, civilization thrived only when its waste streams did not systematically exceed nature’s ability to regenerate fertile soils, biomass, water, or purity by tight regulation of compound concentrations.

3. Understanding the Few Fundamental Design Flaws That Destroy the First Two Pieces

To design a civilization larger and more powerful than ever before — yet still operating within nature’s limits — we rely on the ‘ABCD-in-Funnel’, the one operative system applicable to all topics, organizations, and regions. This system is based on understanding how a small number of basic design flaws, grounded in physical laws, have to destroy nature and society. Putting a “no” to these few flaws yields the boundary conditions of the FSSD — the theoretically and empirically robust way to plan unsustainability out of the system, rather than trying to fix endless symptoms from not doing it [see footnote 2].

Without this boundary‑condition approach, mainstream attempts to solve isolated issues — for example climate change, toxicity, biodiversity loss, poverty, geopolitical tensions — become overwhelmingly complicated. “Fixing” one area often worsens another, generating legitimate resistance and unmanageable systemic conflicts.

Why Fossil and Nuclear Fuels Are Not Part of the Future

The modelling at “A” begins with an essential physical fact: linear fuel flows cannot be scaled sustainably. This is not ideology — it is physics. See the crossed over barrels as an analogy for fossil- and nuclear fuels. Thermodynamics and matter‑conservation laws ensure that extracting finite fuels cannot be sustainable upstream. The rest is about trying to foresee safe time limits for further undermining of our common future this way, and such estimates make things rather more acute than reassuring. The same is true downstream: increasing toxicity, climate instability, unhealth, statistically unavoidable accidents, wars over declining resources and decreasing quality of life for all. Nobody is safe from the consequences, even if some affluent communities and regions may temporarily be able to delay their own consequences – until even abrupter wakeup calls are looming also for them.

Thus, a sustainable future requires a global competition for areas on Earth that capture perpetual energy flows: sunlight, wind, water, waves, currents, geothermal heat. These flows are:

Over the lifespan of a power plant, renewable energy is free, while fuels must be purchased forever. This economic disadvantage grows steadily — and, because of physical law, it must.

Sector‑by‑Sector Modelling Within the Boundary Conditions

Sustainable Food Systems (Land and Marine)

After this conclusion regarding the end of linear fuel flows, it is time to model all sectors within the boundary conditions, see figure. In the top‑left corner, we must imagine food systems capable of feeding two billion more people, with protein production as the bottleneck. In the future model, agriculture and forestry coexist rather than compete destructively. Agricultural violations of sustainability principles no longer push into forests, nor is forestry degraded by unsustainable practices.

Restored land systems reverse desertification, strengthen regional resilience, function as carbon sinks to counter climate change, and visibly improve quality of life — landscapes that “tell our senses that we can live here.”

Chemicals and Material Flows

The future model eliminates systematic increases in concentrations of any compounds — synthetic (e.g., halogenated flame retardants) or naturally occurring (e.g., Nitrogen oxides). Achieving this requires:

This are examples that protects biodiversity as well as human health, as toxicity‑linked diseases are rising across all age groups.

Metals and Non‑Toxic Elements

Even metals with low toxicity risk (e.g., aluminum, titanium, iron) must be recycled close to 100% — to secure materials for developing regions and preserve resources for future generations. Other metals should not be recycled at all, but phased out if they are particularly dangerous e.g. uranium and plutonium, or applied in consumer goods when close to 100% recycling cannot be guaranteed.

Biofuels and Energy Strategy

In the future model, biofuels are not a major energy source. Their life‑cycle inefficiencies — harvesting, processing, transport, combustion and their reinjection of CO₂ into the atmosphere after use make them doomed for scaling. But what a bout “left‑over” biomass from forestry, often claimed to be better off as fuels than being wasted? But even for this purpose they are to be collected, and then far more valuable as feedstock for long‑lived materials and soil restoration.

Physical Encroachment and Land Use

Future civilization avoids any further physical encroachment, to be swopped for the oppositie:

When it comes to city-planning, this requires “decentralized concentration”: compact, well‑connected settlements surrounded by fertile land. Everyday needs are walkable through elegant and resource saving logistics and transports. Suburbs and cities are connected by trains and boats. Smart grids and sharing economies are standard.

Social and Economic Consequences of the Sector Models

On the right side of the figure are social sustainability conclusions.

Humanity is currently trapped in rising interpersonal mistrust as well as mistrust between people and institutions. Since people degrade ecosystems, people — cooperating across cultures and nations — must restore them.

A key underlying mechanism is abuse of power, reflected in today’s extreme inequalities in income and wealth, often disconnected from meaningful work. Addressing this correctly further improves on individual bottom lines by:

This perspective is essential not only in geopolitics and ecosystem summits but also for industrial innovation.

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Also take a look at the Footnotes: