New Power and Pirates 🦜🏴☠️
Pirates: the first agile network-markers...and curious case of the polling station in the carpet store... 🤔
Welcome to the fifth edition of The New Power Review.
This edition will focus on New Power in Organisations and Enterprises, including a short piece from Alex Barker from the Be More Pirate movement exploring how the ‘pirate mindset’ can help you to navigate New Power structures.
And we’ve a round up of new power news: from how we now know that 542 people named David stood as candidates in the recent local elections to emergence of Twitter “tip jars”.
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New Power Pirates by Alex Barker 🏴☠️🦜
Typically, the moment I mention pirates in relation to social change, I am met with a sea of skepticism,‘Sorry, you do mean the sword swinging, thieving, violent criminals, hell bent on tearing down civilisation??’
Well, yes and no. They weren’t all as ruthless as pop culture portrays, and certainly not to their own crews. In fact they were pioneers in power sharing.
Imagine for a moment, that you could vote out your boss at any time, so long as you could rally enough votes. Imagine too, that there were always two bosses elected, the second to check the power of the first, and ensure they remain true to their promises?
That’s what pirates did, and it worked damn well. So well, that even with comparatively tiny numbers, pirates’ operational effectiveness allowed them to outrun the navy. They weren’t a threat simply because they were intent on stealing, they were a threat because they were organised.
But, they were organised in a different way. A democatic, networked way - they teamed up with other crews when necessary, were agile long long before ‘Agile’. (For those that don’t know ‘Agile’ is a process in software development, now developed by many companies, where problems are solved quickly and collaboratively by self organised cross functional often temporary teams, rather than by a permanent department.)
Which is why I’d go as far as saying they were the earliest pioneers of new power, and why I, and our Be More Pirate network, use these principles to make real change. So here’s what we’ve learned from our network:
It doesn’t have to be binary - new vs old- timesheets reimagined 🕟
You can introduce aspects of new power to the degree that feels comfortable, and you can keep enough structure so that it still feels tangible. When you’re introducing a new paradigm, you have to build a bridge between old and new.
But that means very little without an example I know, so here’s one that is having remarkable impact. I recently interviewed John Lodge and Hesham Adbdalla for our Be More Pirate podcast (ep out 24th May), They are founders of Hextitime, the first national time-banking system for health and social care.
Of course, a timebank has a defined structure. Time is the currency (1 hour is given or received) and skills and knowledge are swapped. But the real strength is that it is breaking down the institutional way of working that keeps the NHS heavily siloed, inefficient and to some degree, unequal. Within Hexitime, management meet midwives, nurses meet neurosurgeons. They’re creating a black market network that redistributes resources across the system to do incredible things like upskilling staff and cover hospital shifts at no extra cost to the public.
Relationships are an outcome in themselves - just ask Mercedes-Benz 🚘
In my experience, organisations tend to like outcomes that look like shiny reports, data or some new tech badge, so I often have to work hard to convince teams that strong, trusting relationships are what give you long-term agility and unexpected opportunities.
Here’s more proof.. In 2018, the UK vans division of Mercedes-Benz, formed a new marketing strategy that aimed to build relationships with networks of entrepreneurs and small businesses in the UK, to see how they could genuinely support them. This was a huge divergence from their usual approach of TV ads and other ‘broadcast’ marketing that aimed only to sell. Yet, when Covid-19 hit, and many businesses were facing immediate closure, they were able to utilise these relationships and provide a vans loan scheme to any SME that could pivot to delivering their goods to people at home ordering online. Both parties benefited from these relationships.
Trust is the currency - 🤝💰
One of the reasons that old power seems to retain its grip, is because we imagine that without command and control, nothing will get done, but it’s not true, it just happens differently. I’ve worked with hundreds of people on changing their team culture and have observed the same problems everywhere - old power generates fear, disconnection and poor communication under the guise of order. In comparison, new power can feel exciting but chaotic, and introducing it does, to an extent, depend on an ability to tolerate uncertainty.
But, what choice do we have? Haven’t we seen enough this year to know that uncertainty is a certainty (even HSBC have nicked the slogan for their ads)
The best oppositional force to uncertainty is trust. Trust is the currency of new power, and that cannot be engineered through a plan, it can only be felt. The best advice I have is not to switch it up all at once, just begin to build the bridge.
A roundup of the rest in new power
542 people named David go into a carpet store to vote…. 🗳️
Thanks to Democracy Club who every election crowdsource all the names of candidates, parties and polling stations into one database, Election Maps UK found out that the most common candidate names in the May 2021 Elections were: David (542), John (471), Paul (375), Richard (293) and Peter (275). Democracy Club also surprisingly found that this year there were in fact not one but two polling stations located at Carpet stores. This data as well as providing interesting and weird insights about UK elections also provides a vital function of making basic information about democracy and elections more accessible and searchable to people online. This year on election day and the days before it, they had over 2 million postcode searches to find polling stations on their website www.wheredoivote.co.uk. The data is also used by other charities, democracy groups and even BBC News for its election coverage. For a volunteer run crowdsourcing project that’s a pretty huge impact.
Organise UK use online surveys to expose Amazon’s poor employment practices 🚚
Organise UK is an online platform for workers with a network of nearly a million users. Workers join up and can find others in their company and in similar industries, start petitions, open letters and surveys. This crowdsources information that can then be used in campaigns. A survey of more than 700 Amazon delivery drivers on the platform found that 82% say they have to drive dangerously to hit their daily delivery targets which can be up to 300 packages a day. 92% said they don’t get a break while working and over 90% have had to urinate in a bottle because they were unable to access a toilet.
Twitter adds 'tip jar' for users to pay for good content but a glitch exposes user’s email addresses 💰🐤
Twitter have now added the option for a “tip jar” to be added to profiles so users can click to send a tip to pay for the content they consume. This is one in a series of interventions to better reward content creation on social media (Patreon etc) and raises interesting questions about the economic relationship between platform, creator and consumer. While it is being tested, this feature will only be available to a select group of people including journalists, experts, and non-profits. Unlike other platforms like Patreon or Only Fans, Twitter does not take a share of the “tip” to manage payments and instead directly links to a third party payment provider such as PayPal. However, this has raised concerns about privacy as on the third party platform, a creators’ personal email address is exposed. As more people make money through these direct peer-to-peer online payments (without more traditional intermediary bodies such as companies or agents) more will be needed to regulate the platforms that enable these kinds of exchanges.