People can look at the same problem and see different things. One recognizes a risk. Another questions an assumption. A third sees a possibility the others have missed.

A team can draw on all of those perspectives. Yet having them in the room is only the beginning.

“The more different we are, the greater our potential to complement each other. But it is also harder to collaborate,” says Matilda. “We find it easier to work with people who think and communicate like we do.”

Collective intelligence, Matilda explains, is about how well a team uses its members’ knowledge, experience, and perspectives to solve problems together.

Listening before the idea is fully formed

When someone explains a complex idea, there is often more to their thinking than they can put into words. A colleague can pick apart what is missing or ask questions that help make the reasoning clearer.

“In teams with high collective intelligence, people listen to understand and help each other develop their thinking”, says Matilda. “If I am looking for holes in your argument, I can usually find them before you have had a chance to explain what you really mean.”

These teams also make room for exchanges across the whole group. When discussion revolves around just a few people, the team has less opportunity to draw on what everyone else knows.

Valuable perspectives can get lost when people challenge an idea before they have understood the thinking behind it.

The questions people hesitate to ask

Some contributions never enter the discussion at all.

Questioning a plan, admitting a mistake, or saying “I don’t understand” can feel risky. People consider how they will be perceived and what speaking up might mean for their standing in the group.

“Teams can end up talking about everything except what they really need to address,” Matilda says. “The difficult questions are often the ones that involve a personal risk.”

This is where trust affects the quality of a team’s thinking. An unspoken concern cannot be examined. A mistake nobody acknowledges cannot inform the next decision.

People need enough confidence in their relationships to disagree about the work. They also need to understand how their colleagues respond. A direct challenge that one person welcomes may cause another to withdraw.

“Understanding who you are working with makes it easier to communicate in ways that strengthen collaboration,” Matilda says. “The more trust there is, the better equipped people are to handle the moments when it gets uncomfortable.”

It also matters what people do beyond the discussion. Matilda emphasizes the willingness to take responsibility for the team’s progress: helping a colleague, responding when something changes, and stepping in where needed. Collective intelligence depends on people acting in the group’s interest as well as contributing their own knowledge.

The plan was made when you knew least

Even a team that exchanges ideas openly can lose its shared understanding of the work.

At the beginning of a project, people agree on objectives, roles, and responsibilities. As they work, they learn more. New constraints emerge. The problem becomes clearer.

But the initial agreement can remain untouched.

“We define the goal and divide the work at the point when we know the least. Then we often fail to revisit those decisions as our understanding grows,” Matilda says.

People may absorb new information individually without discussing what it means for the team. Over time, they can begin working from different assumptions about the same assignment.

Are they still solving the right problem? Do they agree on what has changed? Does the division of work still make sense?

A shared understanding needs to evolve alongside the work. Otherwise, capable people can put considerable effort into tasks that no longer fit together.

Why the conversation rarely happens

One of the biggest challenges in developing and maintaining collective intelligence is getting teams to regularly examine how they work together.

There is always another deadline or another problem to solve. Discussing collaboration can feel less urgent than delivering the work, even when the way people collaborate is affecting that delivery.

“Sports teams review what happened between matches. In working life, the pressure to move on to the next assignment can leave little room to examine how the team worked together,” Matilda says. “Those conversations need to be built into the way a team works.”

Different teams need to examine different things. One may lack a shared understanding of the goal. Another may struggle to raise concerns, handle disagreements, or support each other when the pressure increases.

Reviewing the result is only part of the learning. Teams also need to look at how they worked together: did they listen to understand, ask for help when they needed it, and step in when a colleague needed support? Could they disagree openly, and what happened when they did?

These conversations help teams identify what strengthened their collaboration, what got in the way, and what to do differently next time.

About CIBoost

CIBoost is a digital platform rooted in research at the Stockholm School of Economics. Through assessments and guided exercises, it helps teams strengthen their collaboration and collective intelligence. CIBoost won the innovation award at the Swedish Learning Awards 2026, where the jury highlighted its scientific foundation and scalable approach to team development.

Specialization allows a firm to go deeper: in a field, an industry and the problems its clients are trying to solve.

But growth can pull in the opposite direction.

New clients bring adjacent needs. New hires bring additional capabilities. Larger assignments create pressure to do more. Over time, a specialist firm can gradually become broader, often without making a conscious decision to do so.

“The first risk is that you become broad,” says Per Appelgren, Managing Partner and co-founder of Newground. “And once you become broad, you start selling what you have rather than what the client actually needs.”

“You almost have to work against gravity. A specialist firm needs to keep asking what is creating value for clients within its field and how that field is changing. Reinvention is necessary. Becoming everything to everyone isn’t.”
— Per Appelgren

Specialization doesn’t mean standing still

A specialist firm has to evolve as its clients’ problems evolve. Per sees that ability to continually reinvent within a defined area as one of the strengths of the model.

“The pace of change is so high that the consulting you did five or ten years ago may already be obsolete in many respects. If you have chosen a field and keep developing within it, you have a much clearer reason to keep renewing your expertise.”

AI is accelerating that shift. Research, analysis, synthesis and presentation can increasingly be supported by technology. At the same time, companies are trying to understand how AI should be applied in their businesses and turned into real value.

That changes what clients need from consultants.

“There will be less value in delivering the perfect slide deck,” Per says. “Getting a good answer is becoming easier. But knowing whether it is the right answer in a specific context, and actually making change happen, is something else entirely.”

Joel Russ, partner at Adelis Equity Partners, sees the same shift increasing the importance of specialist knowledge.

“The value of a specialist is not just functional expertise. It is understanding the client, the industry and the context well enough to know what will actually work. As technology makes knowledge more accessible, that combination becomes even more important.”

But operating as a small independent specialist firm also comes with limitations. A firm can become dependent on a small number of clients, recruitment and succession can be more vulnerable, and larger client problems increasingly cross the boundaries between disciplines.

Growth can also become uneven. A firm wins a major assignment, recruits around it and becomes increasingly shaped by the needs of that particular client.

“You can end up being defined by the assignment rather than defining the company yourself,” Per says.

The challenge of scale

Newground was built to address some of those limitations.

Its model is based on independent specialist companies backed by a shared platform. The companies retain their own identity, specialization and business responsibility while gaining access to infrastructure, talent, market opportunities and expertise beyond their own organizations.

It also creates opportunities to combine capabilities when a client problem requires it. A specialist company can bring in expertise from another without having to build that capability itself.

For Joel, that was one of the things that made Newground interesting to Adelis.

“What we liked was that there was support around the entrepreneurs without taking the business away from them. You can bring experience, networks and capabilities into the companies, while the people closest to the clients still have responsibility for the business.”

But maintaining that balance becomes more important as the alliance grows.

“There is a big difference between standardizing certain things and centralizing decision-making,” Per says. “If you take the decisions away from the local company, you also take away the responsibility. And eventually you lose the entrepreneurship.”

Joel sees expertise and support as something that can be shared without moving every decision upward.

“The person with the deepest knowledge should still make the decision. The role of the wider organization is to bring in perspectives, ask the right questions and make that person better equipped to make it.”

The role of an owner

When Newground began looking for a new majority owner, the founders had decided not to present the business as something that needed to become fundamentally different.

“We decided we were going to sell what we are, not what somebody thought we could become,” Per says. “That sounds obvious, but it made a big difference in the conversations.”

Per says the difference with Adelis became apparent in the questions they asked.

“With Adelis, we felt quite quickly that they understood the model and got to the difficult questions fast. They were also comfortable with human capital businesses.”

That was central to Adelis’ assessment as well.

“In a human capital business, people are the business,” Joel says. “Retention, leadership and continuity are fundamental to the quality and resilience of the company. Before asking how fast a business can grow, you need to understand how you keep the qualities that made it successful.”

Newground, meanwhile, had a concern of its own: whether bringing in a private equity owner would create growth expectations that could eventually work against the specialist model.

“We were probably more worried that the growth expectations would be unrealistic,” Per says. “But the assumptions were very grounded. If you turn growth up too far, you eventually start compromising on clients, people or specialization. That is not how you build a better company.”

“Focus is what allows a specialist company to deliver more value. The goal isn’t to become bigger at the expense of specialization. It is to become better and grow because of it.”
— Joel Russ

Operational decisions should remain with the people running the business; the owner and board should focus on the questions that determine where it is going.

“The important questions are strategic,” says Joel. “What should this company be in three, four or five years? What are the difficult decisions we need to address to get there? The board should challenge management and work through those questions with them. It shouldn’t be making day-to-day operating decisions.”

Per sees value in the discipline that introduces.

“There are questions you never have to answer this month. What should Newground be in five years? You can always postpone that question. A good owner makes sure you don’t.”
— Per Appelgren

The point is not simply to set a future revenue target. It is to define what kind of company Newground should become and what it should be capable of doing for clients that it cannot do today.

Five years from now, Newground will look different. There may be more specialist companies, stronger positions in selected industries and more collaboration across the alliance. For Joel, the challenge is to make those connections stronger without weakening the expertise and entrepreneurship within the individual companies.

“Newground should still be specialist-driven. The opportunity is to have more specialist expertise and make the connections between those capabilities stronger, so the group can create more value for clients while each company remains very good at what it does.”

For Per, the test ultimately comes back to what clients will need from consultants in a changing market.

“The valuable consultant will be someone who has done it before, understands the domain deeply, but is wise enough to know that this time will be different. Then you give that person the best technology available and make them enormously productive.”

Scaling specialization is not about making specialist firms look more like large consulting firms.

It is about giving them more of the advantages of scale without losing the judgment, expertise and entrepreneurship that made them specialists in the first place.

Many specialist firms make their first hires through existing relationships. The founders know the candidates, understand their track records, and share a clear view of what the company needs.

That approach can work well in the early years.

“Most specialist firms can grow through their own network to around ten people,” says Patrick Donovan, Head of Talent Acquisition at Newground. “After that, things start to break.”

Beyond that point, the challenge is not only reaching new candidates. It is turning an informal, founder-led approach into a shared way of identifying and assessing talent.

“One wrong person can affect everything around them,” Patrick says. “Delivery quality, customer trust, internal culture, momentum, the credibility of the business itself.”

At Stelltec, that challenge became increasingly visible as the company scaled.

“When we were two founders, it was easy to agree on what ‘right’ looked like,” says Marcus Hasselblad. “As you grow, more people become involved in hiring decisions. That’s when it becomes harder to keep the bar consistent.”

For Stelltec, the difficulty is finding candidates who have the specific combination of capabilities the company depends on.

“We are looking for people who understand technology deeply, can engage with business, but also know how to lead large and complex delivery environments,” Marcus says. “There are not many of those people.”

Previous roles and project lists reveal only part of what a candidate has actually done.

“A CV rarely tells you the full story,” he says. “Someone might have been part of a large program, but not actually carried the responsibility you need them to have.”

At Aurentor, the challenge emerged differently. The issue was not primarily access to candidates, but ensuring that hiring decisions were consistent across the company.

“The more seriously you take hiring, the more organizational attention it consumes,” says Erik Bråvander. “Multiple perspectives, calibration, discussions, alignment. Doing it properly takes real time from the business.”

For a smaller firm, that investment reflects how much each recruitment decision matters.

“We don’t have any ‘good enough’ hires,” Erik says. “Every person has a very large impact on who we are as a company.”

Experience also showed Aurentor that personal chemistry could not be the only deciding factor.

“We learned the hard way that you can’t hire only because the gut feeling is right,” Erik says. “The chemistry can be there, but the harder requirements still need to hold up.”

The company introduced more structured hiring processes, including case-based evaluations and clearer calibration across interviewers. The aim was to create a more consistent basis for decisions as more people became involved in recruitment.

Patrick sees the same risk across many growing specialist firms. As the need for new people increases, so does the pressure to compromise.

“The risk is that companies slowly start lowering the bar without realizing it,” he says. “You need more people. You want growth. Eventually, compromise starts looking reasonable.”

This is also why recruitment can be difficult to hand over to an external partner with limited insight into the business and its work.

“Most agencies operate on specifications,” Patrick says. “You ask for a profile, they send candidates, and if those candidates don’t work out, they send more.”

For a specialist firm, the task goes beyond matching a candidate to a list of qualifications. It requires an understanding of the work, the responsibilities involved, and what the company considers strong performance.

“It took time for us to really understand what strong looked like consistently across the process,” Erik says. “Not just individually, but collectively as a company.”

For a specialist firm, demand creates the opportunity to grow. The real constraint is whether it can grow its team without lowering the bar.

Participants join one of Newground’s specialist companies and work as consultants from the start. But before entering their first client projects, they spend two intensive weeks together, with a strong focus on collaboration, self-reflection and leadership.

For both Josef Gustafson and Fanny Jäger Röding, who graduated from Bloom this spring, those weeks were more challenging, and more personal, than they had expected.

“I expected to come into an office and start doing what I had studied for,” Fanny says. “Instead, there was so much focus on who you are, how you work with other people and how you lead yourself.”

The intensity also creates something they will rely on later: a close group of peers going through the same experience.

After those first two weeks, the learning moves into client work, where they begin developing expertise within their company’s specialist field.

“Getting responsibility early is one of the things that makes you develop,” says Sophia Jaconelli, strategically responsible for Bloom. “You take responsibility for something, learn from it and become ready to take on more in the next project.”

For Josef, who joined Adage, that responsibility came almost immediately. His first assignment started just after the introductory weeks.

“I got a lot of responsibility, and that was quite scary at first. You are working with a client and you need to deliver. But I also had a lot of support. I learned an incredible amount from being there from the start.”

Being stretched is one part of learning. Having somewhere to turn while you are being stretched is another.

Alongside their client work, Bloom participants develop together with graduates from different Newground companies. They encounter different clients and challenges, but regularly come together to learn, reflect and share experiences.

For Fanny, who joined Influence People, that became particularly valuable during a challenging assignment early in her career.

“I could talk to the others about what was reasonable, what I could expect and what I could say no to as a junior consultant. I don’t think I would have had that group to share it with if it hadn’t been for Bloom.”

Those relationships also give participants access to perspectives beyond their own specialist area.

“You get this whole network almost for free,” Fanny says. “It has given me the confidence to take on more and contribute in different ways.”

Over time, situations that once felt unfamiliar start to feel manageable. Josef remembers realizing that walking into a meeting with people he did not know no longer made him nervous.

“I just knew it would be fine. I knew how to handle it.”

Because the goal is not to reach a point where nothing feels difficult. It is to become increasingly comfortable taking on things you have not done before.

That takes responsibility. It takes people to learn from. And it takes somewhere to turn when you do not yet have all the answers.

Looking back, Fanny describes the confidence that grew from those first intense weeks and everything that followed in much simpler terms.

“You come out thinking: bring it on. I can handle anything.”

Applications for Bloom 2027 open on September 14.

That recognition has little to do with titles, polish, or traditional corporate signaling. If anything, Patrick believes those things can sometimes become misleading.

“A lot of people are used to structure carrying them,” he says. “Clear hierarchies. Clear ownership. Clear processes. But specialist firms work differently. The environment assumes people will move things forward without waiting to be told.”

That changes what makes someone successful.

The people who tend to thrive here are usually highly autonomous, but still collaborative. They move naturally toward responsibility. They do not wait for structure to create momentum for them.

“It’s a very grown-up environment,” Patrick says. “People are trusted to operate without heavy structures around them. That freedom works really well for some people. Others find it uncomfortable surprisingly quickly.”

Per Appelgren, who has spent years building specialist firms and working closely with founders across the alliance, believes that dynamic exists because these environments operate differently at a structural level.

“Specialist firms don’t really scale through control,” he says. “They scale through trust. The people who thrive in these environments are usually the ones who become easier to trust the more responsibility they get, not harder.”

The challenge is that these qualities rarely appear clearly on paper.

CVs can show experience. Interviews can show confidence. But the traits that matter most inside specialist firms are often behavioral: judgment, ownership, trust, and the ability to contribute without needing constant direction or validation.

Patrick describes one of the strongest signals as forward movement.

“The people who do well here tend to see what needs to happen and start moving toward it,” he says. “Not aggressively. Not politically. They just naturally take responsibility for momentum.”

That mindset also shapes how companies inside Newground work with each other. Recommendations carry weight because they are tied closely to personal credibility. People put their own reputation behind the people they bring into the alliance.

“When we recruit senior people, trust becomes the deciding factor surprisingly often,” Patrick says. “The real question is usually: would I trust my own reputation recommending this person to a customer?”

“In specialist environments, reputation compounds very quickly,” Per says. “That’s why personal recommendations carry so much weight. People are effectively lending out trust they spent years building.”

That creates an environment where trust matters more than hierarchy, and reputation matters more than internal politics.

It also changes how people develop.

“In these environments, progression becomes less about managing visibility and more about expanding responsibility.”

The people who advance are often the ones who consistently create clarity, strengthen the people around them, and make complex situations easier to move through.

Patrick believes that is part of why many people coming from larger organizations experience a period of adjustment.

“In more layered organizations, structures absorb a lot of friction,” he says. “In specialist firms, people absorb it themselves. That requires a different level of ownership.”

Per believes that difference ultimately shapes the culture itself.

“A lot of company cultures are built around managing risk,” he says. “Specialist firms are often built around enabling judgment. That attracts a slightly different type of person.”

Over time, that ownership becomes part of the culture itself. Not as a formal value statement, but as a shared expectation between people who trust each other to operate at a high level without constant oversight.

The companies inside Newground may differ in expertise, focus, and market. But across the alliance, the people who thrive inside these firms tend to recognize each other almost immediately. Not through titles or status, but through how they operate when structure stops carrying them.

A central tension throughout the morning was the balance between operational excellence and reinvention.

Successful companies are built around structures, leadership models, incentives, and operating rhythms designed for stability and predictable execution. Those strengths remain critical, while also making adaptation slower when industries begin moving faster than internal decision-making and execution models.

Transformation emerged not as a program, but as an organizational capability.

Not something operating alongside the business for a limited period of time, but a long-term capability built through continuous interpretation, prioritization, and adjustment as conditions change.

Leadership remained central throughout the conversation, particularly how leaders allocate attention, create clarity, and shape decision-making over time.

A recurring observation was how historical success can become a constraint when markets begin shifting faster than internal operating models.

“The systems that made a company successful are often the same systems that make change difficult,” Johan Rudberg noted.

The systems that once created stability and performance can also make reinvention slower and more difficult.

Structure and culture also remained closely connected throughout the talks.

Reorganizations alone rarely create lasting change. Sustainable transformation depends on leadership, incentives, behaviors, and operating models reinforcing one another over time.

Analytics and decision-making also featured prominently throughout the morning.

Businesses increasingly have access to more data than they can operationalize. The harder problem is turning information into prioritization, learning, and course correction quickly enough to matter.

Across industries, transformation is increasingly becoming part of the operating environment itself.

At Adage, data engineer Christofer Bäcklin sees that shift in the day-to-day work. A few years ago, much of the time went into getting things to run. Debugging systems, navigating documentation, resolving blockers before anything meaningful could happen.

“Before, you could get stuck for hours, sometimes a full day, just trying to get something to run,” he says. “That doesn’t really happen anymore.” What has disappeared is not the work itself, but the friction that used to slow it down.

Something else has taken its place.

“It’s a bit like being in an orchestra where someone suddenly hands out a new instrument to everyone,” Christofer says. “Most people don’t know how to play it yet, but everyone is trying. And every now and then, someone does something that makes you realize how far it can go.”

You move faster. You get unstuck. The work starts earlier. The shift is not just speed. It is scale.

“It’s not like things are just a bit faster,” he says. “It’s a completely different level of volume.” He pauses. “You don’t play a Stradivarius violin anymore. You play a thousand synthesizers.”

Once output reaches that level, the question changes. Not how to produce, but what to produce at all.

“The machine can build almost anything,” he says. “But it doesn’t know what matters. It doesn’t have a goal. You do.” That responsibility becomes clearer, not smaller.

“There is a common worry that AI will make us think less,” Christofer says. “My experience is the opposite. I have never thought as hard as I do now.” When implementation is no longer the bottleneck, the work shifts upstream.

“You spend less time on syntax and scaffolding, and more time asking whether you are solving the right problem in the first place.”

AI does not resolve ambiguity. It amplifies it. “People think it will clean things up for them,” Christofer says. “But if you start with a mess, you just get more mess, faster.” If you know what you are doing, you move very fast. If you don’t, you just scale confusion.

The baseline is moving. Things that once looked like specialist expertise are now widely available. Certain types of smartness are no longer scarce.

“When intelligence is on tap, the question becomes: What do you bring to the table?”

That is where the role of the specialist sharpens. Not in producing more, but in defining direction. Knowing what to prioritize and how to structure the work so it leads somewhere meaningful.

“The real question is not what you can build,” he says. “It’s why you’re building it, and whether it actually matters.”

The gap becomes clear. Some will use AI to build Rube Goldberg machines. Others to scale their own know-how. The difference is not in the tools, but in how the work is framed.

Most work will move toward volume. Fast, accessible, good enough. That is where the baseline ends up. The specialist is defined by what still requires judgment.

As output becomes easy, it also becomes easier to produce the wrong things at scale. The middle ground disappears.

“When intelligence is on tap,” Christofer says, “what matters is what you choose to do with it.”

For Caroline Raning at Influence, that distinction is often where execution is either enabled or diluted. After years of working in large-scale transformation environments at the intersection of business and technology, she has seen how even well-defined strategies lose momentum when they are not translated into something the organization can actually use.

“Most strategies are not wrong,” she says. “They are just not clear enough to guide day-to-day decisions.”

“The ambition to include more perspectives is often right,” Caroline says. “But it also creates a risk. The more input you bring in, the harder it becomes to maintain a direction that remains actionable.”

“You rarely see a lack of activity,” she says. “Usually, there is a lot going on. But activity is not the same as alignment.”

This is often where execution starts to weaken. Not because of a lack of ambition, but because decisions no longer point in the same direction.

Most organizations respond structurally. They introduce new operating models, reporting lines, or frameworks in an attempt to create alignment.

But structure alone rarely solves the core issue.

“You can redesign an organization in many ways,” Caroline says. “But if the direction is unclear, it rarely translates into better execution.”

Clarity has to be built intentionally. It requires making choices, setting priorities, and expressing direction in a way that holds together across the organization.

Clear direction does more than explain strategy. It creates consistency across decisions, teams, and initiatives.

“You know it works when it starts guiding everyday decisions,” Caroline says. “Not just in leadership discussions, but across the organization.”

That also changes what leadership needs to focus on. In complex environments, execution can no longer be controlled in detail. There are simply too many decisions and dependencies.

Clarity scales differently.

“Many leaders still try to compensate with more control,” she says. “But what actually improves execution is making the direction clear enough that decisions can be made consistently across the organization.”

That requires a different leadership discipline. Less focus on controlling decisions, and more focus on reinforcing direction, enabling collaboration, and building a culture where decisions can be made consistently without constant escalation.

“If the direction is clear, you can give people more space,” Caroline says. “If it isn’t, you tend to hold on to decisions for too long.”

Across Newground, that perspective is familiar. The value specialists create is rarely just expertise itself, but the clarity they bring to complex situations.

Because execution rarely fails from lack of effort.

It fails when direction becomes too unclear to act on.

Emble is built for companies facing rising complexity, relentless data demands, and processes that drain human time. Fredrik and Xiuming design AI agents that take on the work that slows organizations down. Gathering data, cleaning it, structuring it, analyzing it and enriching it. “Companies still spend so much time on repetitive work,” Fredrik says. “We help them move toward what should already be executed by agents.” These agents don’t behave like tools. They behave like teammates that require updates, governance, and continuous development to perform at their best. 

That single shift rewrites the entire operating model. “If an agent is part of the workforce, you can’t think in project terms anymore,” Xiuming explains. “Someone has to take care of it continuously.” Emble is intentionally small, using its own agents internally and measuring success by outcomes rather than hours. It’s not consulting augmented with AI; it’s a different category entirely, built around long-term value rather than deliverables. 

The Newground alliance gives Emble the structure to build at speed. High performing agents depend on deep domain knowledge and access to specialists who understand real workflows. Knowledge that sits across the alliance’s network of niche companies. It also provides the operational backbone that frees Emble from early-stage friction. “The culture fit was really strong,” Fredrik notes. “We don’t want to build a binary product in isolation. We want to build with clients, and that requires a broader ecosystem.” 

Market momentum is already proving their thesis right. “Our hypothesis has been validated,” Xiuming says. “The challenge now is guiding clients from where they are today to what’s actually possible.” With Newground behind them, Emble is accelerating that shift. One AI agent at a time. 

The Nordic CPO of the Year Award recognizes leaders who have meaningfully advanced their organization’s procurement function across people, integrity, and results. What sets it apart is how impact is assessed. Not by scale or visibility, but by what has actually been achieved given the conditions. 

“Strong procurement leadership is not about theory or frameworks. It is about what you actually make happen in your context. How you build teams, how you act with integrity, and the results you deliver over time.” 

PIR is part of the initiative as an award partner, together with EBG and an independent jury of experienced CPOs. The award reflects a broader shift in how procurement is understood and who gets to define what good looks like. 

“Procurement has moved into the core of business performance. The best CPOs today are not only optimizing cost, but strengthening resilience, enabling sustainability, and actively shaping how their organizations operate.” 

Beyond recognition, the initiative creates a platform for shared learning. By bringing together experienced practitioners to evaluate real cases, it highlights how procurement evolves in practice across industries, challenges, and starting points. 

“Progress in procurement does not come from one company or one idea. It comes from specialists with deep expertise, learning from each other and raising the standard together.” 

For PIR, this is a natural extension of how they work. Deep specialist expertise applied in real business contexts, combined with a belief that strong functions are built through both perspective and execution. 

“The strongest specialist firms do not just deliver in projects. They take responsibility for advancing their field and contributing to how the function develops over time.” 

As expectations on procurement continue to rise, initiatives like the Nordic CPO of the Year Award help make that development visible. Not by defining a single model, but by recognizing leaders who, in different contexts, move the function forward. 

Do you know a CPO who is making a real difference? 

Large transformations rarely start as large. At PostNord Sverige, what began as a focused effort to improve core HR processes quickly expanded into a full-scale transformation affecting more than 20,000 employees. Delivered in the middle of the pandemic, the program came to span everything from payroll and scheduling to workforce planning, systems, and new ways of working, all while daily operations continued. 

“What started as something quite defined grew as we began to understand the full scope,” says Petra Ehle. “It became clear that this wasn’t about improving parts of HR, it was about redesigning how the organization works end to end.” 

As the scope expanded, so did the need for different types of expertise. Rather than scaling a single team, the engagement was built by combining multiple specialist firms, each contributing depth in specific areas. 

“We didn’t grow by adding more generalists. We combined specialists,” Petra explains. “That’s what allowed us to take on something much larger and more complex than we could have done on our own.” 

The work was carried out as an integrated team, combining PostNord employees and consultants from the start. The focus was not on building a large consulting team, but on bringing in the right expertise at the right time. This was a key factor for both delivery and trust within the organization. 

Different parts of the transformation could move in parallel, while staying aligned around shared goals and outcomes. The setup made it possible to expand the engagement without losing focus or quality. 

That way of working proved critical in a transformation of this scale. Beyond systems and processes, success depended on leadership, cultural alignment, and the ability to create trust across a large organization spread across the country. Psychological safety became a prerequisite for progress, enabling people to engage, take responsibility, and actively contribute to the transformation. 

“The real strength wasn’t just in the individual expertise, but in how well everything came together,” Petra says, pointing to the interplay between structure and culture as a key factor behind the outcome. 

The result was a program delivered on time and within budget, with strong adoption and a fully realized business case. The work has also been recognized externally, with Petra and the PostNord team sharing the journey and outcomes on stage, reflecting the impact achieved and the trust built. 

The case illustrates something fundamental: combining specialist firms does not only increase capability, it changes what kind of engagements become possible.