2020 Summit Special: Be More Pirate with Alex Barker

Here's a podcast treat to be enjoyed by the fire this festive season our second look back at the glorious sunny summit we hosted in September. Our bouns episodes are bringing you the wonderful live speeches in reverse running order so today you have the brilliant Alex Barker. 

Alex's invigorating talk is on the "Be More Pirate" movement that she is now spearheading following the almost unexpected excellence of Sam Conniff's original book "Be More Pirate". A book which, as Alex discusses inspired ordinary team members in a wide variety of companies and organisations to implement improved cultures for change. Sam and Alex have since co-written an equally excellent follow up "How To Be More Pirate" so if you too can see your company benefiting from innovative value-based change definitely give it a read. 

When Alex Barker decided to join Sam Conniff on his "Be More Pirate" journey, she began researching historical pirates and life in the Navy in the 1600s. Putting the ideas that she discovered in context changed the way she framed pirates: "People became pirates not because they were more bloodthirsty or because they were greedier... people became pirates because they wanted to be less miserable". 

She, like many readers of the original book, was inspired by the secret history of ordinary people's innovation. She points out that in terms of team culture and social values, pirates were often "ahead of the curb" in comparison to their law-abiding counterparts. "On a pirate ship is where you saw the first form of social insurance" and that their own norms and rules were actually organised, they simply were not the norms of the time. An unknown example is that pirates had same-sex marriages with practice "so sophisticated that it even had an inheritance clause - so that if I died my partner would get my share of whatever booty we were allocated". 

Also inspired teams, form companies around the world have been writing to Sam and Alex about their decisions to undertake their own Pirate Code. They are using a set of principles to define what they stand for. Allowing them to not only look at where their company is going but to evaluate the direction of travel. A reader told Alex " I knew when I read it, I don't need another strategy or 10-year business plan - I need a pirate code."
 

Companies and organisations may also decide to hold a "facilitated mutiny"- this is to capture the energy and insight of the team, to find fast fixes to unnecessary issues. Alex feels that business can change their culture by giving people permission to improve; by "redistributing power"so that someone who knows the detail of the problem but might have otherwise been afraid to speak up.
 

Alex gives an example of a marine biologist who was bold enough to ask if the 5000 attendees to The International Corral Reef conference should be flying in for it—pointing out that the act of flying for a conference so centred on global warming "doesn't sit with our values". Here, by creating a culture that allowed conversation and also by being bold enough to "fly a flag" fo the idea, they inspired a change and a whole new approach to audience outreach that would otherwise not have been discussed. 
 

Being more pirate is about being bold enough to change a norm, giving voice to the people that might have the solutions to a problem and improving culture. "We all know that we now sit in a moment where there is more possibility than there ever was to make changes - there's never been a better time to be more pirate". To consider not just your approach to scaling-up your business, but the values that you want to grow.