Sep 2, 2019
Meet Anna Rosling Rönnlund, Co-founder of Gapminder Foundation
Q&A with Female Founders
Together with Hans Rosling and Ola Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund founded Gapminder in 2005. Gapminder’s mission statement is to fight devastating ignorance with a fact-based world view everyone can understand. Anna is now Vice President and Head of Design & User Experience at Gapminder.
Together with Ola and Hans, Anna wrote the Factfulness book, launched in 2018.
What are you most passionate about as a designer?
Making important things easy to understand.
What does your typical work day look like?
If I am not traveling to give a lecture somewhere, I will start my day by getting the kids out the door to school and then go to the kitchen table where I usually work. Make loads of coffee and go through my mail and plan the work day. I communicate with colleagues on Slack. Spend the day planning, defining, evaluating some of the projects we are working on or dream up new projects…
If you could go back to early on in your career, what would you do differently?
I would probably have added economy and management to my studies, as it would have helped a lot not having to learn everything the hard way.
What’s your favorite piece of advice for managing work and life?
Be true to yourself and try to do things you are passionate about. That way you might not earn the most money or the most prestigious titles, but you will most likely enjoy your days.
How can media be a better indicator of reality?
Media needs to put the news in context. Always remember to write a few sentences about the event; over time — has it become more or less common? Compare geographies, where is it most common?
Why is having a distorted perception of the world so common?
We love good storytelling and we remembers the most dramatic stories best. Intuitively, we seem pretty good at understanding things going bad. But, to understand slow, positive trends, we are not as good.
And since we seldom see these trends (they do not make it into the news most often and they are seldom thrilling stories) we tend to miss these stories.
What was the proudest moment in your career?
When a high school teacher contacted me after borrowing one of her immigrant students (who hated to read) our book Factfulness and he stopped doing anything else until he had finished the book.
What drives you to keep going when it’s really tough?
That I really believe in the projects we are working on. I believe they can make a difference and I love being part of change processes.
Who are your role models?
People who dare to dream and work for a better future by not complaining about today but trying to improve tomorrow.
What was the last surprising thing you’ve learned that changed your preconceived ideas about the state of the world?
Might have been when I heard a researcher talking about cucumbers packed in individual plastic sleeves (compared with cucumbers without plastics around them) might be a better choice for the environment.
What is the single most important takeaway you want people to have from Factfulness?
Be humble about your own knowledge about the world. You might — just like most other people — be wrong about many things.
Be curious about the world around you and you will learn more.
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