Solitaire Townsend is a Chief Solutionist

September 8, 2023 Impact, Business, Arts, Design, Science, Technology

By: Daniel Simons

Solitaire Townsend sees the future as a race between armageddon and awesome, and she’s betting on awesome. The rebel-with-a-cause, who grew up on a council estate in Bedford and began her ‘activist career’ at the age of 12. Since then she has authored two best-selling books, is an in-demand global keynote speaker, runs one of the most influential purpose-driven communications agencies on the planet, and was recently named as a United Nations SDG Pioneer.

Born a dyslexic, Solitaire reads the tea leaves by asking ‘what could go right’. When questioned about the most recent IPCC report, which the United Nations described as ‘humanity's final warning,’ Solitaire responded that she felt super optimistic about the report because it laid out a clear and achievable plan for what needs to be done.

Her tenacious optimism isn't just a character trait, it's her business model and her gospel, and it's made her a luminary in the world of environmental communications.

Solitaire, or Soli to her friends, is the co-founder, previous CEO, and now ‘Chief Solutions Officer’ of Futerra. Not a typical sustainability consultancy, not your usual advertising firm, Futerra created its own category by becoming one of the world’s first ‘change agencies.’ Futerra believes business can be a driving force for good, and they’re not afraid to put their mouths where their money is.

The majority female-owned company pioneered Client Disclosure Reporting, are Clean Creatives signatories, and were leading advocates for the Better Business Act. They’re also the world's first agency to be officially named a 'Climate Solutions Provider' under the Exponential Roadmap Initiative.

Futerra has team members based in London, Stockholm, New York, San Francisco and Mexico City and has worked with some of the biggest brands and NGO’s on the planet. As world-renowned advocates for the transformative power of positivity, Futerra has collaborated with the United Nations to help people around the globe #flipthescript on climate change, created and hosted Solutions House with Google as part of NYC climate week, released a Planet Placement Guide with the BBC, and developed an update to the Sustainable Development Goals dubbed ‘The Awesome Anthropocene Goals.’

When Solitaire is asked the question that all changemakers are asked: ‘What is the most impactful thing we can do?’ she references Climate Scientist Dr. Katherine Hayhoe, who says, ‘The most important thing you can do to fight climate change is talk about it. Talk about it she does.

Solitaire is a modern day ouroboros who talks the walk as much as she walks the talk. She’s given TED talks that have been viewed by millions, written for The Guardian, and shared activist wisdom with the businessmen and women of Forbes. Now she’s just released her third book, titled ‘The Solutionists’.

In her last book, The Happy Hero, Solitaire celebrated the way that helping the world can lead to a happier and more fulfilling life. In her new book she champions the power of purpose-led businesses to reshape our world - and invites everyone to join the party.

Part ‘pep talk’ for impact-driven business leaders, part guidebook for ‘becoming the type of leader the world needs,’ The Solutionists is a celebration of the power that solutions-focused thinking can unleash on the world.

Featuring interviews with world-shaping titans like Bill Gates and Christiana Figueres and purpose-driven business leaders like the founders of Who Gives A Crap, Interface and IKEA, as well as tips and exercises for would-be changemakers, The Solutionists gives its readers a blueprint for a better tomorrow.

We sat down with Soli to find out what we could learn from the tenacious optimist and advocate for awesome.

Futerra is described as a ‘change agency.’ What is a change agency, and where do ‘logic’ and ‘magic’ fit in?

We came up with the name ‘change agency’ because we wanted to make it clear that we weren’t a standard communications agency or consultancy. We set out to change the world, and change our clients, so ‘change agency’ was the perfect description.

‘Logic’ and ‘Magic’ is about combining left-brain and right-brain thinking. If you just do the logic, you end up with lots of fantastic in-depth graphs and PowerPoints and Excel documents that nobody beyond a small group of people can understand… so you need magic to tell the story - but let’s be blunt, if you just do the magic, then quite simply, it’s greenwash, so both require each other.

What role can storytelling play in shaping our future?

An enormous one. I have a master's degree in sustainable development and I have a master's degree in Shakespeare. Now that tells you something about what a dull young woman I was… but it also shows you the two sides of my heart, the sustainability side and the storytelling side.

One of Futerra’s recent projects was about the power of storytelling. We worked with the United Nations on #FliptheScript, which is about trying to tell a story of how to change the story. It's a story about the story, which I absolutely love.

In your TED talk you attacked the advertising industry and suggested that they should focus less on their ‘footprint’ and more on their ‘brainprint’. You also came up with the term ‘Scope X.’ What did you mean by this and what change do you want to see in the advertising world?

Scope X is a concept, or a language, to represent the influence that you have beyond your scope one, scope two and scope three emissions. Some industries, like advertising and entertainment, have much more influence on how we think than they do in terms of their own footprints.

Now, they do have to get their footprint sorted out. We all have to get our footprint sorted out, but the footprint of your average advertising agency is far smaller than the footprint of your average primary school. It's not significant and it should already have been dealt with, but it is their brainprints that are really quite extraordinary.

I really recommend everyone take a look at the amazing work of Clean Creatives and Purpose Disruptors, who are trying to wake the advertising industry up to its brainprint.

Futerra was the first company in the world to release a ‘client disclosure’ report. Essentially, you advocated for advertising agencies to refuse to work with fossil fuel companies. We know, via books like Merchants of Doubt, that the advertising industry is responsible for perpetuating lies for the fossil fuel industry, but on the other hand a genuine transition could be aided by fossil fuel companies transitioning to renewable energy production at speed and scale. Why do you think it is better for advertising firms to boycott polluters, rather than try to work with them to ensure that they are actually transitioning and not greenwashing?

This question makes me realise how good a job the fossil fuel companies’ PR and advertising industries have done. If you are asking me whether fossil fuel companies are needed as part of transitioning to renewable energy production, the answer is yes, 20 years ago.

Some fossil fuel companies did - I give the example of Danish company Orsted in my book - however, the rest of them haven't. They have not taken part in this transition. They have barely begun worldwide in terms of all of the capital expenditure. Of all the investment that the fossil fuel companies put into the world, only 2% of it goes into renewables.

They have no intention of transitioning, and nor do we need them to. Actually, we can more than happily let those industries go the way that industries that no longer serve capitalism go and actually be replaced by renewables industries. And the individuals, the engineers, the folks on the ground who are working in those industries can have a just transition.

So there's absolutely no role for advertising firms to work with oil and gas companies.

Your work usually focuses on the positive, and there are many voices now saying that we need to stop with the ‘doom and gloom’ and focus on solutions. On the other hand, we saw that films like ‘An Inconvenient Truth’, ‘Don’t Look Up’ and ‘Age of Stupid,’ books like David Wallace’s ‘Hot House Earth’ and activists like Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion have all had profound cultural impacts. How do you think ‘doom’ and ‘optimism’ can best be used to inspire change?

The reason why I focus on solutions isn't because I think that things like An Inconvenient Truth, Age of Stupid or Hot House Earth are bad. I actually think that the work of Greta and of Extinction Rebellion and others has been absolutely fantastic. It's just only one half of the story.

If you've only got one half of the story, this very, very accurate negative half of the story, you are missing the very, very accurate solution side of the story. So it's not that we need to stop doing the negative, it's that we need to balance it out with equal amounts of the positive of the solutions, of the answers and fixes.

Otherwise, we end up with the situation we've got at the moment, which is where huge numbers of people are going from not knowing about climate change, perhaps even denying climate change, not wanting to hear about it, into thinking there's nothing we can do about it.

The job to do right now isn't to go out there and make people even more scared. We have to go out there and shout the answers from the rooftops.

You’ve gifted the world so many new terms and concepts like Scope X, Awesome Anthropocene Goals, Brainprints, and Planet Placement. How do you find or come up with new ideas and which of your ideas are you most excited by? Do you have any creative rituals or practices?

Of every idea that you mentioned, of language that I've worked on, of ideas that I've put out there, of campaigns that I've worked on, there's a million that I've tried to make work and haven't. It's not about quality, it's about quantity.

In terms of creative rituals and practices, I'm a daydreamer and a really big part of what I do is go for long walks and think about things. I don't know why, but my brain seems to work better when my legs are moving. But, that's implying that somehow this is me, actually a great deal of the content from Futerra is not.

It's actually a result of 50 to 70 people working together. I'm very lucky that I get to represent that massive constant unrelenting, continuous sort of creative yumminess that happens in Futerra.

Your book, ‘The Solutionists’ is a business book with a strong focus on business solutions. Do you think that business will lead the charge to a sustainable future?

I think it will, along with all the other leaders. I don't think that there's any one sector that is gonna nail this. I don't think there's anybody, be it an industry or an individual who is going to be the hero and crack this. I think this is absolutely a story of allies and unexpected friends and found family and groups working together collectively to make a difference.

You interviewed hundreds of business and thought leaders for The Solutionists, what was the most interesting lesson you learned from the interviews?

That people who are actually working on the solutions tend to be extremely optimistic, which is strange because they also are some of the most informed people in the world about exactly how fucked things are.

When I surveyed Solutionists, I found the vast majority of them, well over 80% in fact, were optimistic about our chances of solving climate change.

You dedicated an entire chapter of The Solutionists to intersectionality and justice. Why is this important to you and how can solutionists best incorporate these ideas into their work?

I spent a lot of time thinking about whether I should have a separate chapter about intersectionality and justice or whether I should just weave it through the book. I ended up weaving it through the book. Then when I read it, I realised in 2023, it's not enough to weave intersectionality through. You've still got to call it out to make sure that people understand how central this is to the solutions.

One of the best ways to incorporate intersectionality into your solutions when you're working on climate change is to remember that to change everything is gonna take everyone, and that the solutions to which you are drawn are probably a result of your identity, your upbringing, and the culture of which are a part. They’re not automatically the best ones.

You wrote The Solutionists before ChatGPT exploded. What role do you think generative AI will play in shaping the future and how can changemakers best take advantage of the new technology?

Futerra is using it, but we're also being quite careful with it in terms of issues around trademarking and taking other people's creativity, particularly in terms of generative AI. So our creative team are informed by it, but Futerra has not generated any content in the public domain that was AI enhanced.

We're also giving feedback on it. When I was asked to review one of the generative AI programs, I asked it to name the top 10 most influential climate scientists. All the names they gave me were American men. So I've been giving feedback to the big tech companies about making sure that their generative AI is much more inclusive and less biassed.

I'm most excited about how these chatbots are going to help to increase immediate transparency on sustainability for consumers and members of the public who want to know what's going on. Chat GPT and other programs can also give almost instant answers for research that would have taken me years to conduct. I’d also really recommend going and taking a look at the IPCC chat bot. The technology is really revolutionising people's access to information.

It's a technology that's here and others, who are much better experienced and knowledgeable than me, are putting a lot of thought into how we should regulate it and how we should ensure this technology is used appropriately. I will be backing that.

What do you hope people will get out of reading The Solutionists, and what do you want them to do after reading it?

I hope they'll really enjoy it. It's a 240-page pep talk for anyone who really wants to do something about the future. I'm hoping that people will come away from it feeling enthused and inspired, that they'll have some answers, and that they'll have a to-do list at the end of each chapter. There are some exercises to help get you going. Hopefully they'll get inspired by all of the examples and perhaps even have a bit of an itch about the solution that they might want to scratch. I hope that they might have even identified something about themselves and something about the world that matches up in a way that could really make a difference.

Then, after reading it… I want them to take a nice little break and a 10-minute sit down and have a little bit of a rest, because one of the key things about working in sustainability is looking after yourself.

Then, I really, really hope that they will walk away more sensitive and open and awake and aware of all of the solutions that are all around them.