The Small Steps That Shape Our Thinking

by Per Grankvist, founder of the Actionable Consensus Framework – actionableconsensus.org

I do not remember when I first heard about the Framework for Strategic Sustainable Development (FSSD), just as you probably do not remember the first time you saw a tree, a flower, or a cow. Some things arrive so early in life that they feel less like an idea you once encountered and more like part of the landscape you grew up in. The principles of FSSD simply seemed to have always been there, like nature itself.

One possible entry point, though, is 1989. That year, a slim brochure about how we might move towards a more sustainable society landed in our mailbox, just as it did in every household in Sweden. Together with a cassette tape, it explained in everyday language how our way of living was putting pressure on the planet’s life-support systems and what would need to change for nature and society to remain healthy over time. That mass mailing – 4.3 million copies to households and schools – marked the beginning of a shared, science-based understanding of sustainability and became the seedbed for what later evolved into the FSSD principles.

I was thirteen at the time – a deeply formative age – and I most likely devoured that brochure without reservation. I do not remember the exact words, but they must have settled somewhere in my subconscious, which was precisely the intention.

There are certain principles you grow up with that feel so obvious you forget that, at some point, they required a scientific revolution to be articulated. For my generation of Swedes, shaped during the decades when modern sustainability science was maturing, the idea of the planet’s systemic conditions was never a radical political stance or a fashionable vision. It was simply presented as the Earth’s fundamental operating system.

We grew up with the image of the “sustainability funnel” – that unforgiving yet logical metaphor from FSSD that shows how society’s room for manoeuvre narrows as resources are depleted and the environment is polluted. It was an absolute decline in the capacity to sustain society, even as the human population continued to grow in both size and demands.

Living and acting within the walls of that funnel was not a choice, nor was redesigning civilisation to halt its inward narrowing; it was the only viable path. You moved forward by taking steps that were compatible with those conditions, or you did not move forward at all.

When Karl-Henrik Robèrt laid the foundation for the FSSD, he formulated four basic sustainability principles for the necessary redesign, “system conditions” as they were named. They cover all aspects of the future, if we are to have one. Later, the fourth, social principle, was unpacked into five more. Today, a more generic name for redesign of society is used — boundary conditions. To me, these principles felt like laws of nature, as absolute and self-evident as gravity.

In a sustainable society, nature is not subject to systematically increasing concentrations of compounds from the earth’s crust, such as fossil coal and metals, or to increasing concentrations of compounds from societal production, such as nitrogen oxides and CFCs. Nor is it subjected to degradation by physical means, for example through overfishing or large clear-cuts. In that society, people are also not exposed to structural barriers to health (such as working conditions), influence (such as opportunities to participate in elections and polls), competence (such as access to education programs), impartiality (such as the composition of boards), or meaning-making (such as purposeful missions).

For children of my generation, this was not an ideological program but the cornerstone of a rational society. Those abstract principles had a very concrete echo in my own childhood. At thirteen, you begin to look more closely at your parents’ habits and sometimes to question them. My father, a farmer, used petrochemical fertilisers, pesticides, and other chemicals. I, meanwhile, kept a compost and planted a small organic vegetable garden without any of that. But it was never truly an act of rebellion. My father also restored wetlands and adapted his fields to welcome more insects and birds.

My curiosity about another way of growing things developed alongside his own care for the landscape. I sensed, without having the words for it, that modern farming practices were unsustainable; yet as a teenager, there was very little I could change beyond my own small patch of soil. Still, even that was a first, tentative step in a direction that felt instinctively right.

Years later, when I began working closely with cities to lower emissions, I carried that same intuition with me. Reducing emissions felt naturally connected to meeting the system conditions I had absorbed through FSSD, and I naively assumed that most people around me saw it in a similar way – as the obvious direction our collective steps should take.

Working with municipalities soon taught me otherwise. I quickly understood that the gap between ambition and action was rarely about a lack of political will or knowledge. The problem was the internal friction in the municipal machinery. Collisions between tight budgets, rigid departmental silos, and deeply human relational tensions were the grains of sand that made the gears seize up. Even when people agreed on where they ought to be heading, they struggled to take the next practical step together.

To address this frustration, I began developing what later became the Actionable Consensus Framework (ACF). My aim was not to introduce a new grand theory, but to create a purely pragmatic lubricant: a method to lower defences and dissolve hidden conflicts over goals. The focus was on residents’ quality of life and on using stories as cognitive anchors to help civil servants align their interpretations and move from ambition to action.

Only in hindsight did I realise what I was actually doing. By placing the goal further out in time and agreeing on that future state before discussing how to get there, I was practising backcasting as described in FSSD – without naming it as such. I did not conduct a formal theoretical analysis at the start; it simply felt like the obvious way to proceed. The same quiet logic that guided me when caring for a tree, a flower, or a cow – an instinct that some principles must be respected if life is to thrive – was now guiding the way I structured conversations in city halls. Step by step, the path was traced backwards from a future that made sense, rather than forwards from a present full of constraints.

It was only when I was finishing the development of ACF and met Karl-Henrik Robèrt for the first time that I understood how directly my ideas were building on his scientific work. The seeds he had sent out in the mail in the late 1980s had been sitting in my subconscious all along, quietly shaping what felt to me like common sense.

I had not sat down with the rulebook and consciously translated theory into a workshop model. Yet it was there, in every part. It was a humbling reminder of how deeply I had internalised FSSD over the years.

Without my intending it, ACF generated a systemic framework that strictly adhered to the boundary conditions. In the method, the overarching goal is never negotiated in the room – it is already constrained in advance by the boundary conditions for redesign. FSSD’s emphasis on meaning-making and trust had, almost unconsciously, been put into practice by inviting participants to enter the room as whole human beings with multiple identities, thereby creating the psychological safety needed for difficult conversations. Even the vision exercises, which in ACF take the form of fixed storytelling templates about “A day in 2030”, were stress-tested against the system conditions rather than left as loose, unscientific guesses.

The most striking insight – and the most decisive difference from how municipalities traditionally plan – was the use of backcasting. In the conventional approach, which we might call forecasting, you almost always start from today’s constraints: budget silos, existing legal requirements, and short-term conflicts of interest. You then move cautiously forward in small steps based on what is politically possible at the moment. This often leads to fragile compromises where no one is truly satisfied, and climate issues become a side track in an endless series of projects. People drown in processes and measurable indicators. All while the absolute constraints for a possible future, the boundary conditions, are neglected.

ACF, like FSSD, turns that logic on its head by planning backwards. We begin with a future, successful end state, where boundary conditions for re-design set the absolute outer constraints. Within those, values and norms are important aspects in making the content worth longing for. From there, we look back to the present to identify the necessary steps for optional paths towards optional futures, all within the same generic boundary conditions.

Instead of compromises, we work towards an actionable consensus that everyone around the table can genuinely own and defend. By using backcasting, participants are freed from today’s defensive trenches. And the process does not end with visions; it inevitably results in a concrete list of actions: who does what on Tuesday at 10:00?

Instead of asking, “What can we afford to do within today’s budget silos?”, backcasting forces us to ask, “If we have reached a successful end state by 2030, what was the most strategic thing we did today to make that possible?” The question gently invites one more step in the right direction, even when the distance to the goal still feels daunting.

ACF also complements FSSD by doing something the original principles never intended: it offers a practical way to bring actual decision-makers into the room. After all, how can we hope to change the world if the people with the power to do so do not even take part in the conversation? ACF lowers the threshold for participation and helps those decision-makers take that crucial first step.

Looking back, I can see how early the seed was planted. A thin brochure and a cassette tape slid through our letterbox one ordinary day, and an idea fell quietly into the soil of a thirteen‑year‑old mind. I carried it with me for years without realising it was there, the way you might carry a seed in your pocket and forget its weight. Only much later, in the fluorescent light of meeting rooms and city halls, did it begin to sprout into something visible. What I eventually came to call ACF was not a sudden invention, but the slow unfolding of that original seed – an idea first sown by FSSD, now taking root in the everyday practice of changing how we decide, together, where to place our next step.