Laura Francois: Transforming the world through wonder and awe

What if the key to meaningful change lies in awe rather than fear? Join us for a compelling conversation with socio-environmental impact strategist Laura Francois, who challenges conventional change-making wisdom. With an impressive track record working alongside global giants like the World Bank and Greenpeace, Laura shares her insights on how awe can inspire creativity and foster a profound sense of interconnectedness. Together with Ronny Eriksson from New Nordic Way, we explore the concept of awe as an experience that expands our understanding of the world, sparking wonder and curiosity. This episode invites you to reimagine your role in making a difference, proposing that awe can lead to deeper, self-directed transformations.

Discover how embracing moments of awe can reshape our behaviors and relationships with the world. From personal stories about the mystical northern lights to the collective energy of concerts, we discuss how mindfulness and presence can unlock these awe-inspiring experiences. Laura and I reflect on sociologist BJ Fogg's model of behavior change, positioning awe as a positive prompt in contrast to guilt. We delve into fostering genuine grassroots change that impacts communities at their core, concluding with a thought-provoking question: What does effective grassroots change truly look like? Tune in to be inspired and to ponder the possibilities of awe-driven transformation.

Chapters

• 0:00 Exploring Awe in Changemaking
• 16:39 Exploring Moments of Awe
• 30:53 Empowering Grassroots Changemaking

Transcript

Ronny Erisson: 0:00

Welcome With us. You're not just a listener. You're part of the community, the movement driving real progress. Let's explore how big ideas can turn into real-world positive impacts together. My name is Ron Eriksson and this is the Impact Series. Laura Francois, you're a socio-environmental impact strategist and a real inspiration when it comes to bridging the gap between creativity and the environmental movement. You're the founder of the Awe Exchange, a non-profit lab developing a case for O in change making campaigns from Egypt to Cambodia, and co-founded a global impact entrepreneurship program called the Spaceship, where you developed a curriculum for first-time impact entrepreneurs. You worked at the intersection of sustainable development and creative economies across Asia and collaborated with heavyweights like the World Bank, the World Economic Forum and Greenpeace. You've also helped mentor over 50 startups, co-designing circular economy models in the garment industry, developing employment programs for refugees and designing programs for rural artisans. You're currently editing your first book, reload Earth, which explores navigating the complexities of climate crisis. Welcome.

Laura Francois: 1:22

Thank you for having me.

Ronny Erisson: 1:23

That's a pretty impressive background with a lot of interesting points to dig into. I don't even know which is my favorite part here, but I can't say anything. I have an awe for all of this. Each of these episodes, they always start with a big what if? Question, just to get us going before we dig deeper into the specific of each of the parts. So I'm going to throw you into the deep end here. So what if we led change making through experiences of awe?

Laura Francois: 1:58

A lot could happen. That's the beginning of a story. That's the beginning of a story. Changemaking, whether it's social changemaking, whether it's climate changemaking, right now has an engine of fear and guilt and shame. All the experiences you just mentioned in terms of my history, my story, what I've been up to for the better part of the last decade A lot of that work, though it might sound really nice on paper, has to do with me making companies, organizations, governments feel bad about what they're doing so that they can change.

Laura Francois: 2:39

That was the basis of what I was up to as an impact strategist. The basis of what I was up to as an impact strategist. So I got into the work because I felt called, I felt like there was nothing else I should be doing on this planet. And then I got out of the work because I realized that it was absolutely soul crushing to constantly be reminding people that the world is going to end and that companies are not doing well enough, good enough, changing fast enough, and all of that, all of the guilt and fear that I was using.

Laura Francois: 3:13

It was extremely short-lived. Awe, on the other sense, has a very different reaction when we experience awe, and so your what-if question around around changemaking and awe. What if we led changemaking with awe? I think what would happen is that we would feel very differently about how creative and how far seeking we want to go with the changes we want to make. And better yet, I think, we would feel deeply interconnected to those changes. It would be self-directed, not imposed by another voice, another impact strategist like me, who's coming to knock at your door to tell you that you have to change your ESG policy.

Ronny Erisson: 3:59

Jens Nielsen, and what you're saying there is beautiful, because one of my two favorite economies in this world you the like knowledge economy, and then you have the creative economy and of course, the creative economy follows the knowledge economy because you need to first like, know and understand and have your own opinions of things and then you can be creative, which means like seeing something that is not like there for you yet to see, to see and for me to like improve my knowledge, but also the listeners knowledge like you have this word awe, which is like not that familiar word to me actually, so it's A-W-E. Then we talked about wonder here earlier. Could you explain what that actually means? And tales, why is it important?

Laura Francois: 4:41

That's like for me a bit like mystery yeah, it's so great that you use the word mystery, and I'll tell you why. Because awe is all about mystery and you're a creative, um, creatives. Creativity is the byproduct of mystery. When we experience a lot of mystery, we don't know the answers. We're searching answers, we create things to try to answer those questions. And awe the definition of awe is being in the presence of something vast that challenges our understanding of the world. And when I say vast, it can be visually vast we can talk about being on the top of a mountain seeing the sunset but it can also be internally vast, like seeing your baby being born for the first time. That's not visually vast, but internally something shifts quite dramatically. So, being in the presence of something vast that challenges your understanding of the world in a moment, awe can all of a sudden make you stop in your steps. It's often feeling like it's a feeling of goosebumps, or maybe some tears in your eyes, holding your breath, or the sound awe, awe, which is ironic, but I love the fact that it's connected in that way. Wonder is something that happens after sometimes. So awe is a physical experience. It happens very quickly. It's this you don't stay in awe for very long, you kind of pass through it. It's a liminal space, and then you end up in wonder, and wonder is about curiosity, it's about wow, what was that? How did that happen? Where am I going to go next? Something has changed. How am I going to deal with that?

Laura Francois: 6:28

Awe right now is being used in a very positive sense. A lot of people use the word awesome. That's so awesome, that's overused. We hear that all the time. But awful, that's awful is the same. Awe is both positive and negative at the same time. It's different than joy. It's different than beauty. It's the feeling of truly experiencing a mystery and renegotiating how you fit into the world, which is amazing, because that fitting into the world and renegotiation is something that I was struggling with for all of my work when it had to do with social environmental movements, because I wanted people to have a shift and to renegotiate how they fit in. And when you experience awe and there's eight different ways you experience awe, by the way, we can get into those. If you experience awe all of a sudden, you renegotiate and that's a perfect moment to start talking about how you can self-direct that change.

Ronny Erisson: 7:26

Yeah, that's an awesome explanation, thank you. I mean, I would think like this beauty of this whole podcast has been how you explain it so well. It's like having this moment of awe with people like you.

Ronny Erisson: 7:40

There's been a bunch of you already with like so different, unique, beautiful backgrounds, and I'm just sitting here all the time because I that's amazing. It's the goosebumps and it's beautiful, and you explain it really really well Before we dive into the elements of it. How did you end up here? Of course, we read your background and seen the multitude of things that you've done, but why are you in this segment?

Laura Francois: 8:13

I didn't just wake up one morning and say I want to explore awe Though that would have also been a great story I had done. Over the course of my work. I had often collaborated with artists. I consider myself creative with a small C. Other people, it's a capital C. There are creatives in this world that absolutely blow my mind and I remember the first time I collaborated with my co-founder my now co-founder but artist, ben Von Wong. He's an installation artist. He uses waste to create installations. We had collaborated together in Cambodia.

Laura Francois: 8:56

I was working in an abandoned garment factory from a textile factory probably brands that you and I probably someone in this room is wearing a brand that was created in one of these factories, and the amount of textile waste that's in these factories is insurmountable Hundreds and thousands of bags of clothing that's just going to be burnt and completely just off off the face of the planet. How do I convey the amount of clothing that's just going to be burnt and completely just off the face of the planet? How do I convey the amount of clothing to you? I can show you a statistic. I can send you a report. I was doing all those things and nothing was changing. I collaborated with Ben to create installations using the fabric that was in that factory, and the installations were representations of the quantity and also the amount of energy and resources that it takes for us to create this clothing and that created more impact than anything. I had said before, any reports, I had created any stats, I had done a TED talk about this. It was like how do I get this through? And nothing worked until I collaborated with artists and I had done that again in Egypt, I did that in Singapore, we did this again and again where I took something really dry and we tried to Trojan horse it, we tried to translate it into something that made people feel something.

Laura Francois: 10:20

And so, after the pandemic about a couple of years ago, I started thinking. I felt very, very jaded. I felt very eco-anxious. I was no longer connected to my work because I felt like the impact I was having was just, it was just not happening, it was not, it was too small, it was too insignificant, and I thought back to what it was that I felt created the most amount of impact, and it was never anything I could measure. It was always something I could feel with the people in the room, with the stakeholders I was working with, and it always connected to the moment that people had this feeling of awe, where they were then willing to talk to me in a very different way, and so it wasn't the art. It could have been anything. It was art, and art is a huge, incredible driver of awe.

Laura Francois: 11:09

But there are many other ways that we can experience awe, and so, when I thought about how I want to continue growing myself, growing my work, I did not want to continue staying an impact strategist that uses the tools that I was taught, the strategies that I had implemented.

Laura Francois: 11:28

They weren't adequate anymore, and so I looked into the research around awe, and there's an amazing body of research coming out of UC Berkeley. Dacher Keltner is an incredible human being who's been diving into the research behind awe, and I want to take that research and create shovel-ready tools, tools that we can implement on the ground with the communities that I do work with the climate justice communities, the socio-environmental spaces that I'm a part of. So how do I bridge the knowledge from these universities that's talking about behavioral science, how we experience awe, and how do I connect it to the work that I used to do in a way that makes me feel really hopeful about the fact that I'm no longer using fear as the main way to get across to people. That's how I came into it. It was essentially a burnout from my past life.

Ronny Erisson: 12:20

Yeah, really, really beautifully explained Things like this is a bit same topics that Catapult Future Fest is actually working with. Have you been here before?

Laura Francois: 12:33

I have not. This is my first time. I'm a newbie.

Ronny Erisson: 12:36

Super nice to have you here. I think this is what the whole event here is about. It's about bringing such a diverse and impactful group of people together that each conversation you have leaves you with wonder or awe Like that's how I experienced it last year Because people are working from so different kind of perspectives on things and actually like coming with so much optimism here. It's not about everyone just like running around and sharing the problems and it's like not the normal technological startup pitch either, that you kind of like try to explain a problem and then how you solve it and then, uh, running around like getting cash. It's more about creating those genuine connections with new nordic way again, which is the organization I and we represent. We are actually working with a bit similar kind of like model that you have gone through as a journey for yourself, which is based on the realization that most of our investments and money is actually put in like technology and these highly scalable things.

Ronny Erisson: 13:40

The problem is that it doesn't translate to normal people anymore, and who can do that translation in a really effective way are the artists, the creatives.

Ronny Erisson: 13:49

The creative speak with the big C because those they create experiences and things that makes people's hearts sing Something that Steve Jobs also said really well back in the days that we need the humanities and arts because technology alone can't make people's hearts sing. And I think that's where you also are doing a really good thing. If you go and throw things to the news and tell how bad things are, people are like okay, yet another bad thing. If you make them really feel that awe or like wonder or any of like these like, uh, internal feelings, you can actually like make people feel a part of that thing. So I really get where you come from. So you've gotten deeper into that subject. You've started to like also understand how to create those situations, something I wish to learn from you here. Then maybe I'll get to know the tip of the iceberg, but something we can delve deeper into also afterwards. But how does it work?

Laura Francois: 14:51

That's a mystery. I don't know and nobody does. Awe is all about mystery and awe is not prescriptive. I can't say Ronnie, feel some awe for me right now, go for it.

Ronny Erisson: 15:04

I do it already, so you're doing it already, so maybe not in this case, but it's not something I can.

Laura Francois: 15:09

Nobody can prescribe awe, but there are these eight, I'd say, situations that are quite universal. Almost 80% of the world will experience awe in those ways, and the way it works in my mind, or as in what we do at All Exchange, is we explore those eight ways and figure out, thinking of them as ingredients baking a cake. So you have these eight ingredients and we want to use them to explore how the strategies we used to use in the impact space Think of any strategy. Think of the circular economy. Think of donut economics. Think of any strategy, think of the circular economy. Think of donut economics. The donut is dry. It's a dry donut. Any systems designer or any impact entrepreneur that uses something like a theory of change. These are all technical frameworks that are really important to have, but the emotions are very. They're void of emotions. So how do we use these eight to weave into the work that's really important to have in a way that organizations that are creating change will leverage those frameworks very differently? So that's the way it works.

Laura Francois: 16:39

The way it works inside is when you experience a moment of awe. When I talked earlier about renegotiating your place in the world. What often happens is that you feel part of a system. So if you and I take a deep breath right now, let's just so there's oxygen going into your lungs, my lungs we're in an interconnected relationship with a tree somewhere in that breath. That's awesome. How do I slow down enough to feel that interconnection with a tree? Well, I need mindfulness. I need to slow down enough to even witness or even experience that you could be in front of a sunset. But if you're on your phone, you're not going to necessarily experience any awe. So presence is really important and curiosity is really important too. How do I know that I'm having a relationship with a tree by breathing? Well, it's because I looked into how trees work and you know like there's this education component to it, right, so that's part of how it works.

Laura Francois: 17:37

I'm not a behavioral scientist. I think there are incredible people doing really important work right now the brains of behavioral scientists, because what they're looking at is how you can connect a moment of awe to a behavior change, and one of the equations I like using is by sociologist BJ Fogg. He talks about behavior change being three things a prompt like a sudden prompt. A prompt like a sudden prompt. Motivation and ability. So a prompt is something that will like slap you in your face, like something that happens and quickly followed up by a feeling of I can do something and I have the tools to do it. What if the prompt was one of those eight being nature or music, or moments of birth or moral beauty, which is being in awe of somebody else, being in awe of what someone has done for somebody else? What if those were the prompts and we followed it up with motivation and ability? What could happen? What kind of behavior change could happen versus the prompt being guilt? What's the difference Versus the prompt being guilt? What's the difference so?

Ronny Erisson: 18:57

that's kind of in the how of how we're baking. This cake is using very different ingredients, so what?

Laura Francois: 18:59

are the eight. So moral beauty is probably my favorite and the most widespread. It's the one you feel the most often likely, which is when you meet somebody. The example I mean I'm feeling this a lot with what's happening in Gaza at the moment you experience a lot of awe. Again, awe is not joy, it's the feeling of truly almost a reverential feeling when you witness somebody doing something for somebody else, for the goodness of somebody else.

Laura Francois: 19:28

Nature is a huge one. Shooting star I saw my first shooting star not that long ago. I can't believe it took me that long. But that's also a statement for how we live. If we live in cities, we're very far from the awe of nature. Oftentimes it's more challenging. You can feel awe in nature seeing something grow through a cracks in a pavement. You can feel awe in nature seeing something grow through a cracks in a pavement, but it's harder to do.

Laura Francois: 19:55

Astronauts often felt a lot of awe when they saw the Earth. It's called the overview effect, right, this feeling of wow. I want to protect this thing because I've been out and saw it from a different angle. A lot of astronauts came down and had a very different relationship with nature. So how do we experience the overview effect. I hope none of us are going to space. It's way too expensive and way too polluting. But how do we experience the same overview effect by being on Earth? Nature is a big one.

Laura Francois: 20:25

Music there are songs that will make you feel something. It might not be your favorite song, but something will shift in you and you won't be able to describe it. Music is a huge one. Collective effervescence when you're at a concert or a football match and you're all cheering for the same team and you don't know the person next to you but you want to hug them and high five them that feeling your heart rates are actually synchronizing. It's proven that in collective effervescence you're all synchronized. That's also a feeling of awe.

Laura Francois: 21:00

And then other ones have to do with moments of death, witnessing somebody dying. My first job was an end of life care in palliative care, and I remember the nurses talking about the moments of death and how it's not actually as sad as we make them out to be. They're quite filled with mystery, they're quite filled with reverence. So moments of death, moments of birth and art I felt awe the first time I watched Star Wars. It doesn't have to be art in a museum somewhere, it can be anything but creativity is a huge one. And of course, we can't leave out spirituality. Awe is very connected to religion. It doesn't have to be religion, it could just be the belief in something bigger. So spiritual moments, epiphanies, things like that.

Ronny Erisson: 21:50

It's really fun how you're when you're stating each of these different segments. I kind of like started to think of like that certain moment. And then you know, like always chills goes through my body, like finding that kind of moment in my life, and I could like find one directly.

Laura Francois: 22:07

Which one did you have the most chills for?

Ronny Erisson: 22:11

Probably the collective, one Collective effervescence.

Ronny Erisson: 22:14

Because those have been like pretty moving moments when there'd be like I come from little Finland, you know like we don't have that much people. Then when you have gone somewhere abroad, actually joined an event with 30,000 people, 50,000 people, 100,000 people at the same time, somewhere enjoying one certain thing, that's pretty mind blowing. Of course, nature, like Finland, I always remember my first northern lights, for example, when you just like you always have known that they are up there. I've seen them a couple of times, but when you probably first time see them, it's a whole light is full of them, it just automatically happens, and in each segment of music I am a huge like fan of music uh there is like those classic songs that I listened to the radio when I was a kid that I still hear today and they automatically create that moment for me, because it's not that song actually.

Ronny Erisson: 23:05

It's like maybe being like in my mother's lap and all of these like things. So it's fun, it's pretty impressive. Just by going through those, it creates small moments of all the time. So I can see that it's actually a good exercise for those who listen try to think about them, because it happens pretty easily.

Laura Francois: 23:24

That's true, and it's wild that those are not my eight. Those came out of the Center for Greater Good at UC Berkeley. Those are not my eight. Those came out of the Center for Greater Good at UC Berkeley. They're research-backed and one of the most beautiful studies that was done in relation to nature. To give you an example of how they're research-backed, there were basically researchers went to a car park, a parking lot, and asked people to draw themselves on a piece of paper and their drawing took up almost the whole paper. And they did the same exercise when people saw some of the biggest trees in the world in Yosemite Valley. They were coming out of the park, the national park in the US, and they asked them to draw themselves and most people drew a tiny little stick figure at the bottom of the page, not the whole page, and it talks about the fact that when we experience these whether it's in nature or not, any of those eight we feel smaller, not small in terms of insignificant or powerless, smaller in the sense that we feel part of something so much bigger than us. It puts everything into perspective and it actually makes us feel this interconnected feeling that's the fabric of how we create change.

Laura Francois: 24:34

Create change is never a singular, siloed thing. It's not you or me creating change, it's how do we create change within a system? But how do I feel part of a system? That's really hard to do. It's really hard for me to wake up and say, okay, how does my work connect to the system? What is the system? But when we feel these moments of awe, it's almost like it comes clearer, a little bit in a way that we can't necessarily describe, but it's there.

Ronny Erisson: 24:57

Exactly, and it's crazy how you normally like these feelings of awe. You feel those most in the things that are not that fabricated or only came up through the imagination of, like, the human mind, but actually things that relate to things that are really real, so like, as you said, like nature and music and things that are like there, like certain societal constructs don't give you that same thing, like certain societal constructs don't give you that same thing. Religion, of course, gives it, but then it's always like the higher thing of the religion, not like, maybe, church, for example, itself, but actually like the larger context of it, like what is the mystical thing there? Mysterious thing, really interesting topic you're working with. So what, what's next in that segment? What are you, like aiming to actually do? What is the impact of that work?

Laura Francois: 25:49

Who are you helping developing case studies? I realize that everything that we talked about if those listening are similar to my community of impact strategists or social entrepreneurs all of this sounds very much floaty, it sounds very much up here. It's not very tangible. It's wonderful to talk about awe, it's wonderful to talk about these moments, but, again, how does it relate to the fact that we have a poly crisis on our hands and, in a very real way, the clock is ticking? So how do we reckon with both of those things? And so Awe Exchange is developing a series of case studies where we're implementing awe with awe generators. We're not awe generators, but we work with awe generators, whether those are creative people, whether those are I mean, it's not necessarily creatives. I just want to say awe can obviously happen in so many different ways. You can meet a farmer and he can explain to you or she can explain to you how bees are so integral to their farming practice and and you can feel awe. I mean, I know so many farmers who are awe generators, in my opinion. So we collaborate with awe generators and we explore ways that we can weave in what it is that they do, the way that they think, the way they explore the world, into these strategies. So I'll give you an example. We're working on a project with Parks Canada. They're one of Canada's biggest national, I'd say environmental resiliency arms and we are building a micro forest in the middle of the city of Montreal 50 trees, not that much. We are raising funds for these trees. We're raising funds for people to become tree guardians. We're also working with an artist who is going to be composing music with those trees biofield musician, so somebody who connects probes to a living thing like a tree and can create music. When someone who is becoming a tree guardian, someone who is donating for a tree to be planted, if they experience a musical moment with a tree, are they more or less likely to donate for the next 10 years, 100 years? They have an intimate relationship with the tree. Now, did that change something? And those are the types of case studies we're gathering and we're essentially trying to understand what works, what doesn't work. So that's what's next is the gathering of those.

Laura Francois: 28:34

This is a huge hypothesis. I'm sitting here pretending like I know exactly what's going to come out of these. I don't, but I have a really strong feeling that there's something magical at the end of this and what that will look like. No idea. There's a lot of mystery in awe. There's a lot of mystery in my life right now. I've had to give up the idea of measuring awe, but what we are going to look at are indicators, and indicators of behavior change and indicators of action. What does awe to action look like? How is awe used as an antidote to apathy or eco-anxiety? So that's what's next. It's the development of that practice. So looking for imagination-focused partners in that is something we're looking for. Looking for collaboration opportunities with organizations that have impact at their core but who are open to a new way of doing that. So that's what's next. There's a lot.

Ronny Erisson: 29:33

It's wonderful and if you think about like what the big economies that are actually like on the rise, it's the rise of the experience economies that are huge. This is exactly what you're doing If you can actually bridge the gap between like impact companies and the experience economy, helping people actually experience what they have to offer. There is tons of like capital there that will move both sides like both you and then the companies forward. So I clearly can see where you're headed and it makes a lot of sense. Music festivals is like just one of our great examples. They can also have a great impact on people how they experience life overall for their like social inclusion and social possibilities also of people.

Laura Francois: 30:17

So yeah, I mean it's important also to mention that awe is not just for those that can afford to go to a music festival. Awe is not just for those who can afford to travel and see the Northern Lights if you don't live close by. How do we also bring awe or remind? It's not bringing awe, we're not bringing anything. We're essentially reminding people of this universal human experience in spaces where there is a lack of awe or a lack of a reminder of awe. So this is also important for us to hold both right. So I'll leave it at that. That's a bigger question for me and for all of us is that how do we bring it forth in the work where it's truly grassroots and it's truly focused on creating change at the bottom of the pyramid? What does all look like in that space?

Ronny Erisson: 31:06

yeah, and I think that's actually a really good tangent to kind of like end our beautiful episode. It's always good to end with the open question, so we let people answer that and we can let you continue or amazing or awesome work. Thank you so much. This has been really really grounded and good discussion. I can't wait to like continue this with you, hopefully like in the near weeks or near future. I wish you the best possible Catapult Future Fest. Thank you so much for joining.

Laura Francois: 31:37

Thank you, rani, really appreciate this conversation.

Ronny Erisson: 31:40

Thank you.