Responsibly Different™
We started this channel in 2020 exploring how to best use business as a force for good utilizing our B Corp certification journey as our lens. Now, in 2025, we’re taking what we’ve learned and applying it more deeply to our industry of strategic media planning and buying. Tune in to our new Fireside series which are candid conversations amongst our team about the latest news in the industry, explore our upcoming Impact Chats episodes to uncover the power and role of media in shaping culture and examining the social and environmental impacts of our industry.
Responsibly Different™
Beyond Good Intentions: Gamifying Climate Action with Katie Patrick
In this special episode of Fireside, Chris Marine and David Gogel of Campfire Consulting are joined by Katie Patrick — Australian-American environmental engineer, author, and self-described “climate action designer.” Katie specializes in “the design of getting people to change,” applying behavioral science and gamification to help communities and businesses drive measurable environmental action.
She’s the author of How to Save the World: How to Make Changing the World the Greatest Game We've Ever Played — a book Forbes named one of the top five for social entrepreneurs, and one that Seth Godin praised as “an urgent and useful guide for anyone who seeks to make a difference. It will change your work for the better.”
Katie is also the founder of Hello World Labs, a platform where she teaches green leaders how to use data, creativity, and game mechanics to boost climate engagement. Most recently, she launched Earth Doctors, a project aimed at empowering kids to become the next generation of planet healers.
In this conversation, we explore:
- Why traditional sustainability messaging often falls flat
- What it means to design for action using behavioral science and systems thinking
- How climate action can be transformed into a compelling, data-driven experience
- And what marketers, creatives, and purpose-driven brands can learn from the world of games
If you care about people, purpose, or the planet — this episode will reframe how you think about impact.
Welcome to Fireside, a responsibly different podcast where we spark candid conversations about media investments and the strategies shaping the way we connect.
Speaker 3:Hi campers, chris Marine here, founder of Campfire Consulting, and today my colleague David Gogel and I have a special episode of Fireside. We're sitting down with someone whose work has had a big impact on how we think about behavior change and storytelling Katie Patrick. Katie is an Australian-American environmental engineer, the author of how to Save the World how to Make Changing the World the Greatest Game We've Ever Played and the founder of Hello World Labs, a platform where she teaches climate leaders how to use data, creativity and game design to drive real action. She's what you'd call a climate action designer, using behavioral science, systems thinking and emotional design to make sustainability feel less like a burden and more like an inspiring, measurable mission. While this might not be your typical media conversation, I promise, if you're in the business of understanding how people connect and curious about how to design change that actually sticks, this episode is for you. This episode is for you. So, without further ado, grab a camping chair, a blanket and maybe even a s'more and enjoy our conversation with Katie Patrick.
Speaker 2:Chris and I, and really our whole team, have been big fans of yours for a while. But we should probably share, just like how we heard about you and I think you know we've shared like we all, we all have the book, we all, we all, we all love it. But, you know, right around 2020, it was kind of the very start of the pandemic it was around the time that, like we as a business were thinking about our impact and trying to have a greater impact, we were going through our B Corp certification and we started looking at other businesses that were using their platform as a, you know, force for good. And as we were doing research on, you know, social enterprises, b Corps and organizations that were trying to, you know, make change in the world, what we realized was, for a lot of organizations, there was this tremendous kind of gap for them in kind of how they were communicating and the actions that they were kind of seeing with their customers. And as we pulled on that thread and did a lot of research, we really learned about the value action gap and especially within conscientious consumerism, where we spend most of our time working with CPG brands and as we were working through this as a business. It was again started the pandemic. Everybody was really trying to social distance, spend time outside.
Speaker 2:So I was actually on a hike with somebody up here in Midcoast Maine and we were just chatting about work and how things were going. And I was talking about this journey that we were on as a business and talking about the value action gap. And he was a video game designer and he said the way that you're talking about what you're trying to do with your business, you have to read this book. And he's like it will change the way that you think about the value action gap. It will change the way that you think about creating behavioral change.
Speaker 2:And he was like you know, me and all my video game designer friends, we've all read this book and it changed the way that we think about things. And of course it was your book how to Save the World and so I read it. I fell in love. Talked to Chris Chris, I think we bought copies for everybody at the company and we really did fall in love with not only the book but the way that you think about this work. So that was a little bit long-winded, but just to say we've been following you and have been thinking about your writing since 2020. And it's really shaped a lot of how we think about aligning consumer action with marketing messaging, and so we're just so thrilled to talk with you today and hear more about the way that you think about this.
Speaker 1:Great, thank you. And I will save this podcast or that little chunk of speaking. And I will save this podcast or that little chunk of speaking next time I have a crisis of confidence and I'm just going to listen to it on repeat, to like being like my positive stimulus, you know, to get over, like whatever the next challenge is Well that's interesting, right, because, like you're right, you're the author of this book and it's hard to tell the impact that it has.
Speaker 2:But just to say I mean, chris, how many times did we sit in front of a whiteboard talking about this, pulling snippets from your book, thinking about, hey, are we educating versus creating the education model versus behavior model, and really thinking about this not only with our own business but how we advise our clients? So you really have had a very, very kind of deep and impactful kind of role in our company, especially over the last five years.
Speaker 3:And just in my life. And then I'm going to stop gushing and I'm going to get into ask you like, what inspired you this? But in my life, like I think about it when I go to the grocery store, like, am I taking my reusable bags? Why am I forgetting the reusable bags? I think about it when I park and drop off the kids. You have a great section talking about some examples of how to lower emissions, with turning off the car and different use cases that happen there. So I mean that just leads into the actual question what inspired you to write the book in the first place?
Speaker 1:You know it's funny Like I don't have like a pre-memorized like what inspired me. In a nutshell, I don't even really know Like it just is this sort of thing, that sort of grew in my life. I don't even really know Like it just is this sort of thing, that sort of grew in my life. But I just wanted to add to what you were saying about how the book sort of fits into this very deep need that I feel was missing in sustainability and there's a lot of stuff in the book Like it really brings like a big sort of almost like a maelstrom of topics together into this sequence of steps to follow, kind of like behavior, design steps. But essentially at the core of the book is about causality and it's kind of funny, like you think, like causality is like like what is causality? It's not like a word that we use like every day, but if you, there's a quote, I think I put the quote in the book by Steven Pinker, who if you don't know him, he's like a Harvard author, interesting guy, great books, and he has this quote in an online lecture that I watched of his, where he says he either says causality or evidence-based thinking was an exotic idea until very recently in history. And when you think about this relationship between cause and effect, between what actually drives the thing, like even now, in our modern world with our super high IQs and all our technology, like humans are incredibly muddle-headed and fuzzy and not very good at being able to put a strong link between what causes what Like, what is the causal effect of this thing? Because often there's like many causal effects and it's not really obvious. Like if you look at the environment, some people are like it's capitalism, it's definitely capitalism. And you're like well, you could have non-capitalist societies that really harm the environment too. And then you're oh, no, it's like it's technology, no, it's only big capitalism, it's only like the big corporations. And you're like, well, like, small countries still do it. And then you're like really, is it that? And when you ask this question of like, why, like? What is the thread that causes the thing?
Speaker 1:Without trying to get your own biases and your own sort of tribes, like I'm left or I'm right, or I'm one of these people, or I'm like super, super vegan, or I'm like you know, like whatever you know, we could get at these identities and these tribes and you kind of move past that to really try and fundamentally understand this causal effect. That's what we're fuzzy about and that's what my book does and that's what my kind of like core of my thinking does, that I'm passionate about. I'm kind of obsessed with trying to find the absolute causal truth of things and then sort of build up a new kind of schema around that. And when you're talking about, you know, like B Corps and consulting and how do we go greener, and that's really like what's at the cause of like what we do as environmental professionals is try to figure out what is the most efficient causal mechanism to get somebody to do something differently Right, get somebody to do something differently right.
Speaker 1:And yet this has like not been at the centre of what we do as environmentalists, where we're just like having conferences and like talking and doing academic research, like that's the value action gap is a failure of causality that we're just like failing at being very sort of razor, shrewd, kind of clinical about that question question and it's often a question people don't like the answer to I'm like you know what? Like you're like really cool, like, um, you know, people will make some like theater project or your art project of like, or like they'll write a book. Or like some people want to do an MBA, like oh, I've enrolled in like a climate sustainability MBA and she's trying to say, like this has no causal mechanism to the thing that you want to change. Like you have to go straight to a different sort of toolkit if you want to get people to change than what we've been doing. And that's the kind of big aha movement.
Speaker 1:I think for people, why people love the book and sort of get attracted to my work, is that inherent core. So I don't say that I that I'm a causality consultant. On the surface I use words like behavior, design and gamification or storytelling, ecotopias. These are kind of like the surface level words, but the core of it is really that. So I have not asked your question about what inspired me, but we'll just say that that sort of answers the question.
Speaker 3:I think so and I mean it reminds me of you get in the book and throughout your work that I've followed. I think that defining of that God metric and talking about real world impact, you completely change the way that I think about impact and some people might be listening to this and thinking like what does that have to do with media? What does that have to do with marketing? And it has everything to do with it, because so often and you have some great examples in the book, you know we have these there are systemic things wrong with our business culture where we have these business metrics. And then I think what you do really interestingly, which is part of what you were just discussing, is like what is the cause, what is the effect, what is the end?
Speaker 3:Real world impact and someone recently asked me at a thing I was speaking at. They were saying like do you think the word impact is overused? And my response quickly was like no, I just think it's misunderstood and so I don't know when people ask you what impact means, no, I just think it's misunderstood and so I don't know. When people ask you what impact means, what does impact mean to you? Like, how do you define what impact really is when we're talking about the impact, whether it be of a person in this world, a business, in this world.
Speaker 3:What is that?
Speaker 1:Well, yeah, exactly what you said it was. It's the God metric which I start the process off to, which is the fundamental feedback loop that you have a measurable data point that's not in clicks or money, like it's in trees water. It has to be in real-world matter, which I always have to preface by saying it sounds really obvious, right? If you work on climate change, therefore your work or your project or your business actually brings emissions down. Or if you work on urban greening, more green stuff happens, but like a lot of people work on stuff, it is not happening. Like they're working and they're working and they're creating stuff, and they may be even making money and doing things, but like the needle is just not shifting. And I think actually most people who work in sustainability are like that they're doing stuff, but it's not actually, but it's missing that sort of causal bridge. But there's this one sort of concept that was actually just going around in my head this morning that I'll probably write a blog post on soon, which I think is getting to the core of your question between business and impact, and it's really hard to it's hard to come up with business models that you can make money from and have a positive impact, because capitalism doesn't. Capitalism by its nature tends to sort of extract from nature and pollute as much as possible, like it's that's kind of what leads to money most of the time. And to find something that gets people to use less stuff and, uh, create less pollution usually makes less money not all the time, but generally that's the time most of the time. So if you want to create impact, it's kind of quite hard to find a business model and you usually have to rely on, like, government funding or, you know, partnerships with utilities and, um, it just gets sort of sort of trickier. Um. So the way I, um, let's say, I call this theory like the three simultaneous equations of change, right. So in business you only really need one equation to work, which is you make more money than you spend. Like people will buy it, like that's all. It's the only thing you need to worry about.
Speaker 1:So if you've got an existing business and then you try to make it have impact, then it's quite hard. Like, usually it'll just take away from the profit and it will kind of like, like, if Nike makes shoes, the thing that is going to make Nike have less impact is to sell less shoes, right, that's just how it is, even if they make the shoes greener. So it's basically to be green and to have positive impact is to directly take away from your profit and that's built into the business model. Right Now, with an impact business model, your metric, or even if it's like an NGO, is like the God metric, like are you bringing down emissions? Are you, you know, saving water or whatever that kind of stuff is, and trying to get these two things to happen simultaneously, that you're having the impact, and it's directly tied. Like every time you make the impact, the positive impact, you get paid. It's really hard to bring those two things together. And then, like, the third equation is you need to have like a marketing system that's going out and like attracting attention and educating people and building that relationship so they actually kind of like do the action. And so if you get these things, these equations, like out of order, like it's not going to work. So if you have like a business and you're like, yeah, we sell potato chips, you know, and now we want to make our potato chips like more green, like you're not necessarily going to create, like really have like a wide sort of big impact model or kind of concept by doing that and it's very hard to tack the impact on to a regular, normal business. So if you really want to innovate in this space and do something interesting, you have to flip that around and put the God metric first, which is what is the impact? I want to have really deeply understand the data, look into it, look at all those causal mechanisms of what would actually shift this data, and then you have to get really creative about what the business model is.
Speaker 1:That the business model is then secondary to that God metric and say something like popular where I live in California is these heat pump water heaters. Like that's where everything's going right now. So the heat pump water heaters are really important. They have a direct relationship with bringing down carbon emissions. Heaters are really important. They have a direct relationship with bringing down carbon emissions. And so if you want to install more heat pumps, like what's the business model that will pay me directly with that? You know relationship with the city, with the utility, and I've been working on this problem and I've been thinking things like real estate.
Speaker 1:You know I'm like, oh wow, if I could partner with real estate agencies. Property is a really expensive around here, so they're getting $100,000, $200,000 commission on a home, like, that's probably where the money is in this space, or is it something to do with like titles, like property titles and stuff, rather than like, oh, I'll get paid per heat pump, which is probably not much money to sort of justify it? So when you push in, you can really push yourself to come up with different business models that like nobody's ever done before. And then, once you've got that, then you've come up with the third equation, which is like how do I then build a marketing funnel to reach out to people, build the relationship, convert them to the action?
Speaker 1:And if you do those things out of order, it won't work. If you're like, oh, let's build a big audience, you know like media marketing and conferences, oh, great, I've got all these people, and now they're stuck in the value action gap, you know like, yeah, that was really interesting. And then they drift off because you haven't built the model around it. Or you've got some business model that's just like, oh, I do not going to hit the spot if you don't do them in this order.
Speaker 1:I hope that kind of like makes sense. It might sound a bit, maybe it sounds crazy.
Speaker 2:It's the first time I've ever explained it like that before.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, this is something that we deal with all the time actually. So, and I think you're exactly right on the order, right on the order. So, to give you, to give you an example of kind of some of the challenges that that we're faced when we're talking to, to what we again NGOs, non nonprofits or or or like social enterprises, right, even, even so, let's start with like a social enterprise. So, even if we work with organizations where, like they like okay, here I'm specifically going after this like UNSDG this is kind of what our business is built around right, they have that metric and they're working backwards, what we find is that, even when the organization is structured that way, they still think about their marketing separate from how they communicate on the messaging. And then usually they're coming to us and they're confused why there's still that value action gap.
Speaker 2:And what we often say is that you haven't made the impact side shoppable in the way that you think that you have. Like, there's a lot of friction and there's silos around the even, just like the impact around the UNSDG that they're focused on and the actual mechanism of that consumer action. And when you talk about that feedback loop, right, what we see is that there's tons of like tight feedback loops on the consumer side, but it isn't connected to how they think about the impact. And then we see that also modeled when we work with, like you know, we work with national nonprofits and they're coming to us. We help them with everything from like volunteer recruitment to capital campaigns and we spend a lot of time explaining that, like, your audience does not need more information. We need to make it frictionless for them to engage. We need to make it like, we need to gamify this, we need to connect it to this journey and we need to tighten the feedback loop, and it still feels very, very separate.
Speaker 2:So I think it's, yes, it's about that order of operations, but I think it's also about people understanding, which feels core to a lot of your messaging, which is, like people don't? Your audience is already aware of these challenges. They're already aware of what's going on here. They don't need more information. You have to make it simple and easy and fun for them to engage. You have to make it so that way they can see the cumulative impact that they're having. And you have to think about it the same way you think about the product messaging side of your business, and so we often look at this, especially with businesses that are, you know, sustainability is a core focus of what they're doing. It's baked into the way that their business is structured. But we're often saying, like you have your messaging over here, you're talking about your impact over here, but it's not communicated to the consumers the way that you're communicating the features and benefits, even if some of the features and benefits is built around the impact, if that makes sense.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, and it's like so many things that you need to put together. I mean, one thing I've started to see happen this is not in sustainability, but it's just what I've noticed like in the world is this shift from selling products to selling experiences, and it really blew me away. I went on a fabulous holiday to New York last summer with my daughter. No meetings, no work, we were just full tourists. It was so fun and we went to this place called the Museum of Ice Cream. Have you ever been there?
Speaker 3:No, but that is my jam.
Speaker 1:Oh, you have small kids, yeah, you've got to go. So, anyway, like it's $50 a ticket to go to the Museum of Ice Cream. So for both of us it's like $100. Which, you know, it's like a hundred it was a hundred bucks which, you know it's kind of exciting.
Speaker 1:Manhattan is like being financially stung by bees, you know. It's like you just lose like thousands of dollars like a week just by doing normal stuff there and I'm like, holy shit, this place is like. Anyway, so I buy the tickets to the Museum of Ice Cream and this place is like phenomenal. So it's a two story building and they have painted it all pink on the inside and you just go through a series of rooms, sort of like a. It's kind of like you know Ikea, how you go through a series of rooms, but it's much smaller than Ikea, but it's totally decked up, like it's really fun and what they offer you is all you can eat ice cream, and nobody can eat that much ice cream, so you can really not eat that much anyway, and there's multiple ice cream stations, um, and then it's just basically just a really cool, kind of like if a science museum did a ice cream thing, um, you know you'd go in and then you take a slide down at the end to the next level. It takes you about an hour to walk through. The tickets are fully booked. There's a huge line. You have book in advance. You can't just randomly go in. You're only allowed to stay in there for about an hour before they get you out and it's full of people and I was like wow, wow, wow, wow.
Speaker 1:And this is a model that's done a lot in New York because there's so many tourists that go there and it's this idea of shifting from selling an experience to selling a thing. So, to circle this back to what you were saying about selling products and having like people supporting like NGOs and stuff, if it's more of like, I think, reframing the entire experience. So the Museum of Ice Cream is able to charge you $50 to basically walk through a pink building and they've just made it look really fun. They could have just made it into a restaurant, right and the. It could have just been this really cool thing and you could just go in and you pay like seven or eight dollars for an ice cream, um, like every other cafe and restaurant in new york. But no, they're charging like they're basically 10x their revenue by making it this sort of like experience.
Speaker 1:So if you kind of, it really struck me that example because I was like, ah, what if you charge like a pretty, like a high ticket sort of money or whatever it is for the complete we'll just go a bit meta with the example what if you saw it? Even if it's just like potato chips or whatever it is like? It's not just oh, we saw potato chips and here's our little like byline of how we get wind power or whatever on the bottom. What if you look at it as an entire customer journey experience of whatever that experience was? If you were an experienced designer and Jesse Schell, who's the author of the Art of Game Design it's an amazing book on game design, it was really pivotal for me and he actually got on my and he said in my podcast he says I'm actually not a game designer, I'm an experience designer. But my publisher said you can't call it experience design your book, you have to call it like game design, because people don't really know what experience design is. But it's really sort of thinking of that entire experience and really pushing your imagination.
Speaker 1:Out of that, I just sell products. I just sell products, because then you're also stuck into that like simultaneous equation thing and then it's like, well, the more products you sell, the more money you make. So in that way, sustainability and capitalism are directly against each other, which doesn't really work. For a company to just make less of what they do, like that would be the quickest way to have less impact, right? But anyway, I'll just stop talking. Wrap it up, design a complete experience from beginning to end, not just think I need to sell one thing and then another thing and then another thing, and it totally opens up your imagination in a really exciting way, and I think it can be massively more profitable as well. Um, given by that I.
Speaker 1:I don't know how profitable the museum of ice cream is, but it looked profitable on the outside, definitely more than like the $1 pizza shop next door.
Speaker 2:Totally. Yeah, there's a great speaking of NGOs. There's an organization, I think they're based in Toronto, called Planetera and they work globally but they work in communities and try and create these local experiences that tie in kind of the local community and so essentially to try and make tourism not only more sustainable for communities but pull in more of like kind of the people that would like that live in those communities and help them benefit from from tourism experiences. And they have a model where they work with with communities and I think we are seeing more and more um this experience like mark marketplace.
Speaker 2:I think one of the things that I was trying to get I know we are trying to like move the conversation along, but just to when we talk about um like, even like the potato chip example, right, and even if that like, I think what we struggle with often is um even for a sustainable brand, helping them communicate to consumers like the individualized impact that they can have when making a sustainable choice, um and and having that be a part of the messaging and that's something that I know, chris, and I often pull examples from your book and when we're talking about is that you can't just communicate this like broad messaging around the importance of a specific cause and whether or not it's a nonprofit that's trying to recruit volunteers or a consumer brand that's trying to get people to shop more kind of sustainably, you have to help that individual consumer or that volunteer understand that individualized impact that they can have and how that can scale.
Speaker 2:And as you think about what one person having an experience can do, to use your example, or just like more broad bush, how you think about the way people move through the world, how do you think people can use the principles that you talk about in your book to kind of bake that into the way that they talk about their either their product or service, their experience, their NGO?
Speaker 1:Yeah, we'll try to sort of like pull it all together, like what you're saying about the feedback loop and the individualized impact. One thing that I have never, ever seen done that I really really want to see done and think it is sort of the answer to this is, I call it like the nested goals or like nested data of your impact with your collective impact. So one great tragedy of most sustainability and environmental communications is atomising people's individual impact instead of seeing us as groups. So you've got like an NGO or a government or a utility and they're like this is what we need you to do. We need you to put on solar, you to install a heat pump, you to compost. And I'm not like against the whole individual action thing. I think individual sustainability behaviors are super important. Some people kind of like poo-poo them, but they fundamentally you can't escape that. So there's all this stuff that we need to do as individuals, or you turn up here and then there's kind of like the big one, which is like all of California or all of America, and there's a problem that people sort of drop off. They're like well, I don't know if, like, is my individual impact really doing anything? I don't know if it's doing anything and you feel like just lost, like a drop in the ocean. And then people start to question like, well, why should I do this stuff when the system is set up this way? And what I believe the answer is is this nesting of feedback loops. So you get the data for yourself and this is kind of and you embed this in the experience design. So the experience is seeing your individual impact in the context.
Speaker 1:Okay, I live in a fairly big apartment complex, so what is my individual impact measured in a feedback loop of my water, my emissions, my food, my waste and then, but what is it in relationship to everybody on my floor? There's probably about 20 other people here. This is why I'm getting super granular with this answer Everybody on the third floor, the 20 others there, what about everybody in my building? And we've got five buildings here? So what about my building versus I'm in building A? What about building B and building C? How do we compare to them? Right? What about our block? All of the other apartment buildings on the block? Right Then? What about our neighborhood? This is just like I don't know. It's like a few blocks. It's not considered a suburb. It's smaller than a suburb right, then our neighborhood, then the city of Mountain View, which has about 90,000 people, then we're in the city of Santa Clara. Then Santa Clara is the county in California. It could probably go northern California.
Speaker 1:So, if you see, when I get into this really granular sort of nesting of feedback loops, I can see like it's not just me lost in a sea of California.
Speaker 1:Like I can see like, oh, wow, like, why am I using up three times as much as like the other people, like, because people are very sensitive to being like above and below average. I could see in the context, um, this is a core like gamification principle. Like I can see in the context of like everyone else who's similar to me, which is all the other two bedroom apartments on my floor, that's as close as it can get. And I can see that in the context and I can say, oh well, if I do too many loads of laundry, like it really blows me out over, like everyone you know. And then in the context of these other kind of like nested things, and then I see the big number which is like all of california and it's all strung together and I think if we really want to hit that motivation in people getting those nested goals would be really, really powerful. And it's never been done. I don't even know. It would be very difficult to get the data, but not impossible.
Speaker 1:But I think that's the way I want people to start thinking in terms of these feedback loops and getting less individualized, like you do need individual action, but you need it in the context of the community-based goal.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's super helpful. I know we spend most of our time thinking about this around volunteer action in conscious consumerism, but I could see how that could apply to a lot of different categories, for lack of a better way of saying it. But I think you nailed it, which is the individualized responsibility piece. It's hard to feel like how that fits into the larger story, but when you talk too broad, it's hard to motivate an individual to take action. So figuring out how those loops nest together, I think that's a really smart way of putting it and definitely something that we should think more about.
Speaker 3:And the other piece of this that's really important outside the feedback loop, which you talk a lot about, which is optimism and the power of optimism and imagination. I think it was one of your talks you wrote down we need less. I have a nightmare and more. I have a dream, and one thing I love about following along with you on social media at least, like you're constantly painting these pictures of, like this is what you know a regenerative future could look like. Can you talk about why that's important, what that does for that emotional pull to? Especially in times like this, it can be hard to think optimistically, given the climate that we're in sometimes, but it's so important that, A there's the feedback loop everything you're talking about and, B that we remain focused on a better vision for the future.
Speaker 1:Yeah well, it's really actually really painfully simple and I don't know why it hasn't been more popular in the green movement. Luckily, with AI art now it's much easier to make these kind of depictions than it used to be that if you want to create something, you need a goal. Like if you were going to I heard someone explain it once like if you were going to build a stadium, you would need to imagine what the stadium looked like, do a drawing of it, make a plan and then like reverse engineer the plan into existence. Like that's how we build things. So if we're trying to build a sustainable world, isn't that like what we need to do? Like it's just, it's so obvious, like you need a vision and then you need to reverse engineer the vision and you need to actually like get stuff done that leads us towards this vision. And that is not how it's been done. Like it's been. Here is a nightmare, let's stop.
Speaker 1:The nightmare has generally been how the environmental movement has kind of been most of the time I've been in it, because nightmares were happening. There were like terrible, terrible environmental things happening and they were like holy shit, this is really really bad. Let's stop this bad thing. So that's kind of where it came from. But then over the decades, you know, bad things were stopped, you know, and often if people are like new to sustainability, they might not realize like it's been a very successful movement, like we have clean air, we have like clean oceans, we enjoy actually a pretty good environment, because of the history of the environmental movement actually winning all of these fights, right. But now it's come so far, a lot of like just the sort of thinking pathways are still stuck in that and we kind of need a new pathway which is more to yeah, to imagine like what is this future that we really want? And then it's like it's just so obvious. You look at it, it's exciting, it activates that sense of agency.
Speaker 1:The problem with the doom style messaging, if there's a problem, is it activates kind of like fear and dread. Like you look at it and you're like, oh, that's really bad. Right, that is not the mind state that comes up with ideas that really innovates. That like gets you sort of on a decade-long journey to invent something or fix something or build something. That it really takes Like you need a vision of like oh, I want to build this thing. I imagine a street that is, instead of being full of polluting cars, this street has like a beautiful, like clean-powered monorail and like parks for children underneath and bike lanes and only one lane, you know, for cars and utility vehicles and like you imagine it, and it's just so beautiful and you're like, wow, that's incredible, you know, and then you use that to then market to people, to get people's interest, get them involved and then start the you know the hard part of like reverse engineering, what you need to do to get there, and it's inherently optimistic because the vision is wonderful.
Speaker 1:So, like, like I talk about optimism, like sometimes people like have like sort of an objection to optimism that it's like some naive, it's like a naive prediction of the future. Like maybe some people mean it that way, but when I talk about optimism, I am not talking about predicting the future, I'm talking about designing the future. I'm not like, yeah, am not talking about predicting the future, I'm talking about designing the future. I'm not like, yeah, I can't predict the future, like I don't know how bad climate change is going to be. Maybe it won't be that bad at all, maybe it will be really really bad. Like we don't actually really know how bad or not bad, it's going to be. So I'm not going to project that. Oh, it's definitely, definitely going to be like the worst thing ever.
Speaker 1:All I can do is say I'll let I have a goal. Like the optimism is a goal, I have a goal, this is my goal. It's really beautiful, I love it. So let's make the goal happen. And I don't really care like about getting into the prediction of how bad climate change is, like it's just sort of an irrelevant kind of mind state, mind state for me. Um, so that's it. I mean, I could go on and on about it, like you can go deeper into the neuroscience of what this does actually actually. Can I let me just add a couple?
Speaker 3:please do. I'm all about it. Yeah, I'm having like all sorts of aha moments click off in my mind right now, so yeah, it's super fascinating.
Speaker 1:Um, one of the uh guests on my um podcast, uh, did a study actually on environmental imagination and I found this study blew me away and I've been practicing it also, which is he got a group of people to basically imagine a positive, sustainable future. Now he had the control group. I don't know what the control group did, but that's the group that does nothing but then one group read a paragraph of what the clean energy, sustainable future would be. The other one had to write their own paragraph. They didn't draw it I get people to draw them but just the writing of it. Now, both the ones who read it and the ones who wrote it out themselves, just basically from their own imagination, there was a prompt that just said how would you imagine a clean energy, sustainable future? And then they got like 15 minutes to write what they thought. It was the ones who wrote their own. It had a dramatically bigger effect when they tested their environmental behaviour and their political engagement and the way they tested it was that they had a voluntary option to write a letter to, like, the head of the EPA or something, and it was real, like these people were actually. It was a real letter that was going to really be sent for a real issue and they could leave the study or they could stay an extra like 10 minutes and write this letter. And then they also tested their actual, on the ground, real life green behaviors. 30 days later and both the letter writing and the real behaviors went up.
Speaker 1:A model like doing it, like not learning. This is sort of the value action gap too not just learning, but actually making and doing triggers something in our system that just gets people to do stuff, and I have hosted multiple of these before and after. Eco art and I just just on zoom, I've never even done it in real life and people I ask people to bring a picture of a part of your environment that's like ugly and concreted or whatever, and we sit there on Canva. These are people who don't even know how to use Canva. Like it's so simple. It's literally dragging and dropping trees in Canva over a photo they've taken of a road and people get transformed by it, like when I've had two people after I did one message me a week later and say, yeah, since I did the before and after workshop, katie, I just made contact with my local city. I found there's a group of 14 people that meet every two weeks and they're involved in like changing this thing. And then I met them and I turned up and one person was.
Speaker 1:I took the picture and I presented it to our local environmental planning committee and I was just like this stuff is like, this is like the cocaine of the environmental movement like no one, like everybody's been climate dooming and nobody realizes that if you drag and drop trees in Canva onto a photo, like magic happens right. And then people also emailed me back like people honestly have a complete spiritual, psychological, emotional epiphany from this exercise. Like it's wild, it does something and it's also like, in the sort of academic framework of it, the guy who did this study, if I can remember it properly, he says that people need three things in order to get activated for collective action. You know, moving out of just my own green behaviours and sort of a part of something bigger is that they have to one believe there is a problem and the environmental movement is really good at that. I think we've got that nailed, agreed, we good at that, I think we got that nailed, like everyone Agreed, we've got that that the problem is legitimate.
Speaker 1:But then and then the second bit is and this is the next two bits we're not very good at right. The second bit and this guy is not an environmentalist, he's a political scientist. So he studies political movements and this is why the academic research is so interesting to study, because you can draw from deeper levels of knowledge and other movements and sort of see how it applies to us. So we think, okay, cool, we really got that nailed. So the second bit is that you have to believe that an alternative future is viable, like it's legitimized. So if you don't have the vision, okay, yeah, cool, you know the problem. You have to activate that kind of I have a dream speech. Like I believe that this alternative future, like, for example, like a clean energy future, is possible, like if it was just totally like fantasy, like oh, we're all just going to like live in like space bubbles, like it wouldn't be, like realistic, right. So people would just be like that's not realistic. So they have to, for a start, believe that it's true, that it's real, that it's viable. So that's why we need these photos and these pictures of what these worlds could be that actually are realistically viable things. So we're like, yeah, yeah, that's definitely. And they have to believe that this future world is more legitimate this is the word that research kept using that it's the correct way, that the current way is illegitimate. Like, say, if it's something like slavery, like we believe that slavery is, like it's not okay, it's wrong, it's the wrong way and the other way is the right and correct way, it's the legitimate way. And so you've got to create that. Put them side by side, like, say, someone with cars. Like there are some people that think like cars and roads are legitimate, like that's the correct way and to have no cars and roads is the bad way. So I mean, I'm kind of anti-car, so we've got to switch that around, we've got to be no, the car and the roads is the bad way, kind of like old slavery, like it's got to go, it's the old way and the new way. This is actually the correct way, the legitimate way way.
Speaker 1:And then the third bit is that you need to have people feel, have that sense of agency, like, oh, this is the action you know that I can do. Like there's some sort of like there's a leader, I'm part of a group. This is the mechanism of which I take action. There's a viable mechanism I can use to sort of impact that. So that's when you need basically like, well, what are you going to actually like do in your real life? You know, not just like learn. Like, well, what are you going to actually do in your real life? Not just like learn Doing your sustainability MBA is just learning and learning and learning you need to be doing turning up to the city, meetings, like whatever it is, getting involved in small groups Small groups are really powerful for this.
Speaker 1:And then, you know, going to joining your local bike club or whatever. So, yeah, you need those three pillars to underpin movements of social change, like they're like it doesn't happen without those three pillars and we've been kind of missing the two not completely missing, but pretty like low on the other two. Right, we've got one, so we need to bring the other three pillars up to match the level of knowledge that we've put out into the world of legitimizing the problem. So, yeah, there's the complete sort of academically sound answer.
Speaker 3:And I think you hit on something there that I know I preach quite a bit, which is that you don't need to be thinking about hitting the masses, that you can do so much more work if you mobilize a smaller, really engaged group of people. And it's like everyone thinks you have to go out and I have to, like, reach everyone. It's like no, no, no, no, no, no. Like let's just think about not even just think about reaching, but like how do we mobilize people who actually care and who are actually going to do something?
Speaker 1:that's where it's almost like a mind cancer what do they call it now? A mind virus. I would say, thinking that you need to get out to the masses in a mainstream way is almost it's a complete cognitive error, like it's a mistake. It's completely wrong in every way. Yeah, you need to get small groups of people like five people. When I say small, I mean really small. Five groups of people have to get small groups of people like five people. When I say small, I mean really small.
Speaker 1:Five groups of people have something real, something that you can photograph when you're finished that's how I like to define it and then do stuff in the real world and then it builds out the tapestry and the fabric and then those people go to the next group and then to the next group and then you start to like bring it all. It'll all start to sort of like filter out and that is how change is made. It's the only way change, the only way it happens. It's the only way it happens. So it's the only thing that you can do. But yeah, I've really been on the horse of just banging that recently, of just trying to. Yeah, I really like I feel like I really got the message that this was the way to do it and observing the way other people had done it. Um, yeah, if you're not doing it that way, like nothing's happening, like it's the only way things happen, yeah so we have to have a part.
Speaker 2:So you touched on a big passion of mine and something I spend a lot of time on, which is trying to get complete streets and open streets kind of concepts, especially in rural communities. I'm here in the state where Chris and I live, which is in Maine. We have to have a part two. We have a bunch of people that we can invite on because this is something that's very, very important to a lot of us.
Speaker 2:But getting people to prioritize people over cars and understand all the benefits from a cultural perspective and from a health perspective, and what I have found and we don't have time for this conversation now, but we'll do a part two is beating people over the head with the data doesn't really help. I've never seen so much nimbyism in my life, even from people that are environmentalists, when you start to talk about changing roads and changing the way that we're structuring traffic patterns. So we should have this is a whole, nother part two, just structuring traffic patterns. So like we should have this as a whole, nother part to just about open streets, complete streets and how to get community members on board with that, because that is a huge issue here in our state.
Speaker 3:And as we wind down, though, I think this is a good natural segue, because I know we've talked so much about how powerful everything that you know how we first learned about you is from the book. But Hello World Labs, can you tell us a little bit about that? Because it seems like so much of what you're talking about here is what you're putting into action with Hello World Labs by trying to teach that behavioral science, gamification to leaders, right? I am.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and thanks for asking, because I have been in the cave of very hard work the last six months building Hello World Labs into from basically me doing sort of freelance projects and making content, to building the School of Climate Action Design. So I've put together Hello World Labs is growing up into an adult and, yeah, I'm just about to launch an online community using the Mighty Networks platform. I've got like multiple courses, training, a six-week coaching program, all of the tools that I've developed with Hello World Labs. It's actually 78 projects. I just built a new website and I was like, oh my God, I've done 78 projects in the last few years. It's crazy.
Speaker 1:But all of the tools that I've developed for community outreach, for zero waste, for doing local sustainability groups, all of the behaviour tools, the kind of like gamified behaviour tools, I put them all in there and so I can, yeah, help train people up on the action sequences that really work to trigger action and also be able to provide, like my own tools to kind of disperse to people, um, you know, and kind of bring us all together. Um, and I've also invited uh, I've got a system now of inviting authors of the academic papers to come in and give guest sessions in the community. So that's something I'm really excited about to uh kind of systematically in every time like a paper comes out, that's good. We systematically invite the author to join the community to share their knowledge, share their research paper and hopefully provide some mentorship or guidance to the environmental programs.
Speaker 3:Nice, Well, make sure to put a link in the show notes for people to check that out, because that sounds very exciting. So just kind of like lightning round questions, if you'll humor me. I think you've answered this first one. But what's a book or thinker who has deeply shaped your worldview?
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, steven Pinker, who I mentioned earlier, and the better angels of our nature. I've never gotten upset about Trump or anything bad ever since I read that book.
Speaker 3:Nice, and what's a sustainability solution or innovation? You think doesn't get enough attention.
Speaker 1:I think composting, worm farms, growing your own food, just really simple stuff like that, getting that organic cycle, Probably. Growing your own food, actually actually people growing food in spaces in suburbs and urban places.
Speaker 3:there's all this like grass and parks and stuff that's just not used for anything and I think the way that I always kind of like like to leave this show with is around hope. So what gives you the most hope right now?
Speaker 1:I love working with kids. I have an earth club, that's also. All. The materials are actually also in the school of climate action design and I teach gamified sustainability stuff to kids to get them to do the action. And I've never had so much fun in my life, it's never been so more rewarding. I just uh, just it's so fun, like, and people should check out earth doctors and sign up, because I'm setting it up in a way to that anybody can set up their own earth doctors club in their own school so I want them to spread through all the schools.
Speaker 1:That's my dream. To have every school have an earth doctors club and the 12-week earth doctors program to bring in the whole families. That's my, like, ultimate life goal at the moment to get to that level.
Speaker 3:That sounds very neat. Is there a link or something like that that we can find and share with folks?
Speaker 1:Earthdoctorsus. There's a website.
Speaker 3:Okay, cool, We'll drop that in the show notes as well. Well, Katie, I know David mentioned it we have to have a part two Appreciate your time. This is. It's going to benefit everyone that hears this when they put this into play. So thanks for being here and sharing your thoughts and wisdom with us.
Speaker 1:No worries, thank you, and thank you for all the super friendly, encouraging words at the beginning. You guys are my feedback loop. You're my feedback loop for my work.
Speaker 3:Well, friends, thanks for joining us around the fire. I'm Chris Marine here with David Gogel, and we hope this conversation with Katie Patrick sparks some new ideas for how we think about impact storytelling and designing for real world action. In the show notes you'll find links to Katie's book how to Save the World, her platform Hello World Labs and her newest initiative, which sounds so cool Earth Doctors, a powerful project designed to engage young people in the mission to protect our planet. So let's help make some dreams happen and get our future generation involved in building the world they deserve. And if you like what you heard or maybe it didn't, but you stuck around we'd love for you to drop a positive rating or review. It helps more people discover these purpose-driven conversations. Until next time, thanks for listening and keep tending to the fire that fuels positive change.