Book review: The Solutionists: How businesses can fix the future
Key theme(s):
Media Type: Book
Title: The Solutionists: How businesses can fix the future
Author: Solitaire Townsend
Year of Publication: 2023
A rallying cry for anyone with a brilliant idea to save the planet through business
“A solver of problems” – this is Solitaire Townsend’s introductory definition of a Solutionist. She then goes on to spend the next 240ish pages explaining what exactly that means. Because what she lays out is the profile of not just a problem-solver, but an entire personality type and attitude to the world, and business in particular. Being a Solutionist is, it seems, not just about what you want to achieve, but also how you think about achieving it. And it’s hard to argue with that – certainly the problems in front of us require innovative, interdisciplinary and multi-facetted solutions, which can only be generated by a particular mindset.
For Townsend, that mindset is built around five “points of the star”: vision, grit, flex, fun and soul, and comes in three types: Architects, Accelerators and Actioners. I’ll leave you to read the book to explore those characteristics and archetypes for yourself, but taken together they describe an attitude that could perhaps be summed up as ‘grounded collaborative optimism’. And it’s an energising and empowering thing to read – Townsend does a good job of both presenting the scale of the problems that face us, but also setting out some potential paths for how individuals might go about working to solve them.
Because although the subtitle of the book is “How businesses can fix the future”, this remains a deeply human book that focuses more on the people in the business than the business itself. What she describes is not so much about changing business processes or goals as about changing the attitudes of the people involved in that business (or creating a new one). We all know Drucker’s famous line that “culture eats strategy for breakfast”, but when it comes to achieving corporate buy-in, the argument always seems to be about making the business case. And that is the correct approach for some, of course. But just as effective, I think, can be inspiring a shift in attitudes.
‘Inspiring’ is the operative word here, and I don’t mean in the sort of ‘inspiration’ that comes from twee videos of toddlers sharing their snacks or whatever. Instead, the book’s inspiration comes from the assertion (and consistent reassertion) that we do have the power to make change. And she does this by liberally sprinkling stories and anecdotes in a really effective way - hardly surprising given that a whole chapter is dedicated to “Storytelling the solutions”. I personally find the stories that come from smaller and earlier-stage businesses more convincing than long quotes from big-name CEOs (see below), but that might be personal preference based on my own circumstances. The important thing is that they all provide good examples of where individuals have seen a problem, identified a solution and set about implementing that solution, often through a change in attitudes.
Another thing I do really like about the book is that it provides plenty of avenues to explore. This is perfect for those who know they want to dedicate their career to helping combat the various environmental catastrophes looming in our future, but don’t know where to start. Whilst I am trying to do my part by focusing my career of translating for those organisations and business, I’m sure the list of areas to explore in the “Hope is a business plan” will be useful to anyone who is sustainability-curious, but not sure where to start. I also have to mention two ideas that I had heard of but had never really explored – the first is the idea of a ‘full-stack’ solution. This concept is borrowed from the world of programming, where ‘full-stack’ programmers offer the advantage of being able to build a system from the ground up, rather than just one particular level of it. This really got me thinking about what a ‘full-stack’ translation solution might look like, an idea I’m sure I’ll come back to . And secondly, the concept of “joyful entrepreneurship” (to which an entire chapter is dedicated) was a joy to read itself, even if the actual tips is gave were, largely, common sense.
If I have a criticism of this book, it’s the fact that it is based on, and continuously slips in quotes from, prominent Solutionist ‘geniuses’ (my word, not Townsend’s), as fonts of wisdom. I don’t critique this because I think that what they have to say isn’t worthwhile, but because I think we need to be wary about putting these sorts of ‘visionaries’ on a pedestal. I suspect that Townsend was thinking carefully about her target audience when she was doing this. Certainly this kind of approach is a common one in the business book world – you only need to look at the array of books dedicated to, for example, the ‘teachings’ of Warren Buffet to see what I mean. There are undoubtedly ‘celebrity’ CEOs in this field that do lend a certain legitimacy to the argument that sustainable business can be also be successful business. But as you can probably tell from the number of scare-quotes I have used in this paragraph, I have my doubts about whether this is wise.
For one thing, no business is perfect – for example, one of the CEOs quoted is Toni Petersson, the (now-former) CEO of Oatly, who Townsend describes as “an excellent businessman” (p. 162), And yet, for all the good Oatly has done, it’s not exactly a model of radical transparency, as explored by the excellent three-part “Oatly Chronicles” from The Europeans. Of course, the quote is chosen to emphasise the importance of being bold if you want to operate in this field, and Oatly is certainly an example of that. And perhaps it’s not fair for me to pick out one quote from the entire book that just happened to stand out to me because I recently finished listening to that series. But I do think we need to be wary of creating an air of exceptionalism around particular ‘exemplary’ individuals by saying “Well, X is hugely successful, and they think Y. so it must be true.” It creates a sense that you have to be a particular kind of person in order to be a Solutionist.
And this is very much not the overall argument that Townsend is trying to make. Her view is that anyone can be a Solutionist (though some are more naturally suited to the role than others). And to be fair, she also gives plenty of examples of young-but-growing businesses that are doing amazing things to improve the sustainability of how we make and sell things. So why such a reliance on these celeb CEOs? I guess it does go back to that question of legitimacy and crafting a message for a particular audience, who are not yet ready for the more radical degrowthing that will probably be essential in the long run. And ultimately, I’m not exactly in that target audience, and to be honest, I mostly found myself skipping over the actual quotes from these CEOs. Whilst they do often illustrate the argument being made, I personally think Townsend is persuasive enough in the way she writes and reasons. I’m already convinced of her arguments without them being backed up by big names.
So, would I recommend the book to others?
It has to be said that the above criticism is probably more of a personal preference than a pivotal problem with the overall argument. As I said, I find Townsend’ persuasive and engaging. And this book does fulfil at least one really vital role, in that it convinces people who have innate Solutionist tendencies that they are not alone or “a little odd” (p. 1). It also does feel empowering to read. I certainly have a couple of post-its sticking out of my copy with questions like “How can a translation business become a full-stack business?” and “What problems would a translation Solutionist set out to solve?” So it is undoubtedly worth a read, and it’s also a fairly quick read – whilst the problems that the book sets out as needing addressing are hugely complex, the shift in attitude that Townsend is proposing is really quite straightforward, even common sense. But sometimes what you need is for someone to take all of the common sense solutions and put them into one easy-to-read collection.
Takeaways for sustainability communicators
Don’t overcomplicate your message – there are no bonus points for unnecessary complexity.
Use stories to your advantage, but think about your target audience and the kind of stories they want to hear.
High-level abstract ideas need to be counterbalanced with what they look like in practice.