Kalle Reflects on Polarbröd, crises, and evolution

The Polarbröd Group is so multifaceted that it can serve as a model of the complex system ‘Society’. Where the idea of ‘sustainable livelihoods for generations’ has been incorporated as a vision.

Innovative cooperative investments are assessed in accordance with FSSD’s logical Operational System:

A “How can all the companies together be modelled to meet the boundary conditions for  scalable and attractive designs in the future?”

B. “What are Polarbröd’s strengths and challenges today in relation to A?”

C. “What actions can be considered as possible steps along the way in the creative tension field between A and B?”.

D. “How do we prioritise the actions under C so that each step can pay off enough for taking forthcoming steps?”

Really exciting is that the Polar Group recently went through a crisis, one of the factories in the food supply burned down in August 2020. What happened then in the complex social model? It underwent an evolution, a quantum leap to a higher degree of function.

Shock followed the fire, followed by Reflection, and then  Innovation in a dynamic interplay between staff and its flat, inclusive leadership. The result was that the company, like a Phoenix, rose from the ashes. This fits nicely with the theory of true evolution in complex systems. It means that evolution, unlike  development in a more incremental and traditional sense, can only happen when threats are so dire that a possible outcome is the downfall of the whole organization/system. Only then is a quantum leap to higher levels of performance needed as well as possible. This has been investigated by Nobel Prize winner in chemistry, Ilya Prigogine, who calls such crises “bifurcation points”. A kind of turnstile between doom and success. He has shown that this applies to completely different systems, from chemical ones, via ecological to social.

Thus, then, in the crisis, but not before, real evolution can be achieved. And that is exactly what has happened with Polarbröd, to the relief of everyone who suffered with Polarbröd during the difficult days, and who crossed their fingers that we would keep the company with us.

And that is what we hope will happen to our deeply tourmented human civilization these days. Not that it is developed, or in other words, “fixed” and repaired and saved and recycled a little here and there, which many decision-makers hope will suffice. Instead, new energy-, transport-, agriculture-, forestry-, materials- and geopolitical governance systems are now required, mighty of tackling the root-causes of our unsustainability. True evolutionary steps.

One prerequisite for such a favourable outcome of crises is that systems have managed to sustain sufficient diversity up to the crisis, as a basis for resilience. Which means a plastic form of responding to crises. Not something rigid that cracks in old structures when the big crises come, but something that, due to diversity, can respond dynamically to severe stresses and in new ways that comply with robust boundary conditions for what is needed in the new situation.

For organizations or nations, it may be structures for leadership and people with different talents and personalities, that existed before the crisis, but may not have made much of a fuss then. They suddenly emerge as necessary to deal with the new threat by the called-for evolutionary step.

In Polarbröd’s case, it was a matter of diversity of companies and employees with different skills and personal qualities who felt free to act within a robust and validated framework of boundary conditions for what must be in the future, all set and monitored by a flat leadership. In contrast, visionless organizations with top-down control structures perish, in the absence of resilience, from such serious crises. They cannot take advantage of the opportunities offered by Prigogine’s bifurcations. In China, there are two signs that together express Crisis, the first “Threat” and the second “Opportunity”.