6. Reorganize Yourself

Or How to Collaborate to Achieve Scale Rather Than Growth

Butterfly wings in boxing gloves

The Golden-Age pirates knew that in order to take on far greater odds, build an alternative society and turn their mutiny into a success the answer lay in outperforming their rivals, not outgrowing them. One core aspect of their power was their ability to organize democratically, and their focus on achieving scale without an accompanying degree of growth that could slow them down and ultimately prove fatal. For the pirates, staying small meant staying strong.

If you want to grow the effectiveness of your mutiny, you need to know how to collaborate within your own small team and then network with other groups of like-minded people without falling prey to the outdated idea that bigger is better. As we saw with the modern examples of piracy at the end of the last chapter, small groups have the ability to ignite big change. The average pirate population during the Golden-Age is estimated to have been around 1,500 whilst the manpower of the Royal Navy topped out at 45,000 before dropping to around 15,000 after the wars against Spain came to an end. The approximate ratio of navy to pirates was therefore 30 to 1 and then later 10 to 1. So, how did the pirates stand a chance against an enemy so much larger in size? The main reason they succeeded against such odds was because they embraced the paradox of scale and rejected the static organizing principles of the Establishment and replaced them with something much simpler, fairer, more flexible and more effective.

Of course, it helped that, as former employed sailors themselves, they knew exactly where their enemies’ vulnerabilities lay. They didn’t merely exploit those vulnerabilities, however; they took them as the starting point for their own approach and flipped the old ways on their head. Where their enemies were constrained by ingrained practices and processes, the pirates were agile and deft. Where the Establishment was dogmatic and dictatorial, pirates could act both autonomously and collectively, with different crews coming together for a battle and then disbanding again quickly into smaller groups. When the navy tried to overpower them, the pirates used classic David and Goliath tactics to turn the tables. They achieved impressive scale without slowing down; their ability to operate as an agile network is a technique to admire and learn a huge amount from.

Today it’s especially important to understand how to collaborate effectively and achieve scale without growth because the idea that we should relentlessly pursue growth is now often stalling our progress and reducing our autonomy. Whether it’s bloated government, vast multinational corporations or the process, people and politics between you and the person you actually need to talk to, the organizations running our lives are so obese that any notion of accountability or responsiveness has been lost. ‘Bigger is better’ has been an underlying mantra of globalized capitalism, but the problem is, in order for services, goods, supply chains, burgers, download speeds and shopping malls to constantly get bigger, faster and shinier, we need to feed consistent economic growth. We’ve ended up believing that our economies can only keep going if they keep growing. Or, as Frederic Laloux, the author of Reinventing Organizations, puts it: ‘We have reached a stage where we often pursue growth for growth’s sake, a condition that in medical terminology would simply be called cancer.’1

Our addiction to growth at any cost explains how we’ve ended up with enormous conglomerates owning so much; for instance we’re in a situation where pretty much every major food brand in the whole world can be traced up to one of just ten companies. You know most of their names; Mondelēz (Kraft), Nestlé, Mars, PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, etc. And what a reassuring line-up of names it is, too. Thank goodness the life force of humanity is in those loving hands, undoubtedly striving to reduce their environmental impact in line with the planet’s needs, respecting cultures and identities with their advertising, producing ever healthier goods, whilst protecting workers’ rights, even if it is occasionally at the cost of their shareholders’ returns.

Ahem.

The idea that bigger is better doesn’t extend only to physical goods but to online platforms where digital giants obsess over size in an unhealthy way. One of Google’s mantras is to ‘10x’ anything they can lay their primary-coloured hands on, and Facebook’s internal rallying cry is to ‘move fast and break things’ to help them maintain the pace of their incredible growth. Both companies are involved in global infrastructure projects to spread internet connectivity to every corner of the world. Even if it means they have to hang super-enormous hot air balloons carrying powerful internet routers over the world’s few remaining WiFi-free zones (which it seems it does), they are on it. I acknowledge that at many levels in all of those organizations there is someone with a sincere agenda to develop solutions to pressing global issues, but, even if they are well intended, their overall growth agenda remains problematic. As people wrestle with what they want versus what they really need versus how much the earth can provide, the default assumption that big is good, and bigger is better, presents an ever increasing threat.

Om Malik, a venture capitalist with an insight into Silicon Valley, was quoted in 2017 as saying:

The big companies have been so obsessed with growth that there’s been a lack of social responsibility. Now the chickens are coming home to roost. Silicon Valley is very good at using words like empathy as marketing buzzwords, but they are terms we need to internalise as an industry and show through our actions by building the right things. Otherwise it’s all bullshit.2

It’s easy to feel powerless when it seems that a handful of giants exist only to serve their own narrow interests, and it’s hard to believe that a small group of people can change things themselves, but the idea that small groups can’t change stuff is just not true. Organizational behaviourist Margaret Wheatley expressed this opinion like a pirate when she said:

Despite current ads and slogans, the world doesn’t change one person at a time. It changes when networks of relationships form amongst people who share a common cause and vision of what’s possible. This is good news for those of us intent on creating a positive future. Rather than worry about critical mass, our work is to foster critical connections. We don’t need to convince large numbers of people to change; instead, we need to connect with kindred spirits. Through these relationships, we will develop the new knowledge, practices, courage and commitment that lead to broad-based change.3

In other words, ditch the inferiority complex and believe that if you start small and then secure deep engagement from your crew, open collaboration will help you change whatever it is you have in your pirate sights. Even if that’s the giants of technology who define the current landscape.

And to cement the point, it might just be that once again, as it was for the pirates, bigger really is no longer better, and the paradox of scale is still on our side. In his excellent essay ‘The Paradox of Scale’, Pete Maulik, managing partner of global innovation agency Fahrenheit212, argues that now ‘the world favours the underdog’. He warns that for big business ‘big’ is now part of their problem, now that their scale has transformed from ‘asset’ to ‘liability’. And he emboldens the upstarts out there stealing the show, to whom, he argues, power has ‘irrevocably shifted’ using new agile tools to get equal share that previously only a global infrastructure could allow. Pete makes a clear case that power really has shifted.4

Malik, Wheatley and Maulik’s arguments that even the biggest institutions are vulnerable to the will of the people is now being proven in the courts of public opinion – for Google and Facebook, at least, who’ve both seen their brands go rapidly from being loved to turning toxic as a result of those organizations’ perceived arrogance.

At the end of the last chapter about rewriting the rules we caught a glimpse of how mutinies had the potential to turn into movements overnight. In this chapter, we’ll see how pirates turn their mutinies into well-structured communities who prize collaboration and connection above all else. If you reorganize like pirates, there’s no need to keep growing, just to keep going.

Pirate ships were fairer and more diverse than anywhere you’ve ever worked

Before we began this section of our re-education of pirates, most of us probably assumed that pirate crews were anarchic, chaotic and drunken. Well, most of us would be wrong. In truth, pirate ships were exceptionally well run, equitable and accountable, though they were indeed drunken from time to time.

Many pirates had experienced both the brutality and the best training of either the Royal or Merchant Navy. They took the skills, techniques and tactics these organizations taught them but resented and rejected the exploitation, bullying and hierarchy that was also on offer. Other pirates came in the form of freed or escaped slaves who’d experienced humanity at its most inhuman. Organization aboard pirate ships was designed to rectify the poor conditions both groups had endured. The pirates came up with new rules and systems to prevent anyone from being similarly mistreated. Of course, crew members all hoped for a lucrative income, but pirate ships were also designed to provide a fairer way of life where members would get not only equal pay but also an equal say.

Pirates designed democratic structures that predated the English, French and American systems of representative democracy, which, as we’ve discussed, were more participatory than anything that even the good old Greeks managed back in ancient Athens, where suffrage didn’t extend beyond an elite group of white males. Pirate democracy usually included everyone. On pirate ships, and eventually in the Republic of Pirates, the policy was one pirate, one vote on most matters.

And it doesn’t stop there. Democracy is great in theory, but can be clumsy in practice – all groups need a system of governance in order to operate effectively, especially when under threat. Pirates knew instinctively and ahead of their time that nothing sucks more than an org chart. (If you aren’t familiar with the term then lucky you. Basically, an org chart is an always-out-of-date family tree for an office, often a Human Resources person’s equivalent of a meth habit.) To avoid implementing a painful hierarchy or chain of command that could be abused, the pirates invented a responsive way of organizing themselves that allowed order to be maintained when they were in need of cohesive leadership. If the pirates were under attack, or busy taking a ‘prize’, the captain temporarily became the all-powerful commander, but as soon as the engagement was over, democracy reigned once again.

This dynamism, and an almost instinctual ability to flex between a type of organizational collectivism and total authoritarianism, looks to me a lot like an early form of the Holacracy movement. Holacracy is a modern form of non-hierarchical but dynamic management ‘invented’ in 2007 that predicts the future will be ‘self-organizing’. Many managers in mainstream organizations may find it a little ahead of its time (in other words, terrifying), but it’s worth investigating, because, if the pirates’ track record is anything to go by, its day will come. Holacracy sounds like a very twenty-first-century concept, but the idea of setting your own rules is as old as the eighteenth-century pirates, and just as every pirate prediction eventually ended up influencing the mainstream, self-organization is likely to follow.

Beyond one-pirate, one-vote proto-democracy and an agile organizing principle that could switch between quasi-socialism and a temporary dictatorship in times of conflict, pirates also instinctively knew that nothing makes a good team great as effectively as ensuring it’s a diverse one.

The broad reach of their recruiting meant that the pirates had a phenomenal pool of talent at their disposal. Their blindness to colour and focus on talent resulted in some significant non-white leaders emerging in the Golden Age. Black Caesar, a tribal chief who had been kidnapped from Africa and escaped from slavery, was welcomed into the pirate brethren as leader, strategist and man of great strength, eventually becoming Blackbeard’s right-hand man and a renowned pirate captain in his own right. Pirates weren’t proactively progressive, but even if as a by-product of a talent-first approach to recruitment, by today’s standards it’s still ahead of the curve.

Indeed, it could be argued that the pirates of the Golden Age were amongst the world’s first equal-opportunity employers. Admittedly, the turn of the eighteenth century isn’t famous for fairness to marginal groups, but history is on the side of the pirates here, and if you’re sceptical, remember Anne Bonny and Mary Read, proto-feminists who were accepted and respected on deck. The same was true for ethnic-minority crew members and same-sex couples. ‘The deck of a pirate ship was the most empowering place for blacks within the eighteenth-century white man’s world,’5 said Kenneth Kinkor when he was project historian at Expedition Whydah, a museum on Cape Cod that houses artefacts from the first documented pirate shipwreck ever recovered. In his essay ‘Black Men Under the Black Flag’, Kinkor counted non-white crew members under piracy’s most influential captains; Samuel Bellamy 27 out of 180, Edward England 50 out of 180 and Blackbeard 60 out of 100. Across all pirate ships non-white crew members averaged out to around 33 per cent.⁶ Just for reference, that would make an eye-wateringly ambitious diversity target for many of the twenty-first-century’s most progressive major employers. Global bean-counting and consultancy firm PricewaterhouseCoopers, who are leaders in the field, have a global target of 25 per cent diversity, amongst a ‘global’ team.

We’ve already touched on the stories and significance of some of the legendary female pirates. And there are others such as Jacquotte Delahay and Grace O’Malley who are also very visible in broader pirate history, but a much less well known part of pirates’ progressive attitudes was their recognition of gay rights. A degree of homosexuality was common at sea as things got pretty close between the men after many months aboard. In the navies, the same was also true, but was very severely punished giving rise to the infamous Winston Churchill quote, where he summarized the values of the Royal Navy as ‘rum, sodomy and the lash’. As we’re learning, the norm on pirate ships was a wholescale rejection of the repression of navy life. Pirates recognized that deep and meaningful relationships evolved between crew members, and instead of punishing them, they literally celebrated them. Pirate society took same-sex relationships so seriously that they created rituals and legal practices around them. They gave the name ‘matelotage’ to the deep bonds between men, sometimes even with a ceremony attached, and the happy couple could signify their willingness to share rights of ownership and inheritance if they so chose. Again, these principles were not intentionally progressive, and there’s much debate about how widely used they were, but in at least some instances, for purely practical reasons, pirate crews sometimes included what would now be seen as openly gay elements and practised a form of same-sex marriage.

So, even if it was more by default than design, pirates created an organizational model with an environment that was very, very far ahead of the times: diverse and highly responsive to both its members’ talents and their needs and sensitive to the harsh realities of conflict … As a result they were a tight and loyal bunch who pooled all their resources to share rewards, risks and decision-making. Impressive, interesting, inspiring – but what are the key lessons in there for you?

Try doubling down on these points. Firstly, pirates created inclusive systems of organization that fostered strong bonds between diverse crew members, making them accountable to each other and innovative in their thinking. They practised equality, but they were tough about talent – they didn’t carry dead weight or suffer fools, they saw talent before colour, gender or age and, most importantly, they acknowledged the benefit of a diversity of backgrounds.

You can do exactly the same; if you apply the same blend of principle and pragmatism as the pirates, there is no limit to the talent you can surround yourself with. The more open you are towards deliberate diversity, the more innovation will follow. The more vigorously you encourage collaboration and connection between those diverse elements rather than defaulting to one single opinion, the better. There is no single organizational model you are obliged to follow. There is no one type of person you or your team should strive to imitate (and if you do all look the same then something’s gone wrong). When it comes to diversity, ethnicity and gender aren’t the only important elements. Surround yourself with people who also think differently from you and you’re sure to stay ahead.

Pirates were agile, before agile was a thing

Operating in non-hierarchical and accountable teams that valued diversity of skills and opinions gave pirates an edge over their foes and competitors. The other main weapon in their organizational arsenal was the ability to respond fast to a dynamic situation. As we’ve seen, part of this was the ability to switch between a collective decision-making model to a hierarchical one with a single authority figure before (crucially) reverting back to the collective. But the other incredible facet of pirates’ organizational responsiveness was less about leadership and more about a willingness to assemble and then disband teams as the situation demanded. Pirates scaled up their crew when they needed to and scaled down again afterwards which meant there was always just enough skill and labour to take on a challenge, whatever its dimensions.

According to statistics from pirate historian Marcus Rediker, the average size of a pirate crew was around eighty men.7 Blackbeard was in command of just twenty men on one ship when he was caught and killed, though he’s known to have commanded hundreds of men across vast fleets at points in his career. On one of his missions he amassed such a flotilla and caused so much mischief along the eastern seaboard that he was able to hold the entire coastal city of Charlestown hostage for a week, an act of such military, political and economic significance that it led to the ‘1718 pirate crisis’, as it was known, that swept North America that summer.

One of the largest pirate crews ever assembled was organized by Henry Morgan, who put out the Call of the Brethren across the New World and united crews from all countries and cultures for an all-out assault on Panama City, a strategic outpost of the Spanish Empire. Bringing together 2,000 men, Morgan shamelessly, savagely, but successfully looted the city in one of his most infamous misadventures whose ramifications would be felt all the way to the early establishment of the British Empire. Once the city was in ashes, the pirates crewed down with as much ease as they had teamed up, demonstrating the incredible dynamic force, responsiveness and flexibility of their ability at networked organization.

Though they may have used their might for dubious purpose, their ability to scale up and down from the nimblest of twenty-person teams to the city-shattering strength of 2,000 is admirable even by today’s ‘agile first’ standards. Operating at different capacities, blending teams of people from different cultures with diverse capabilities to create devastating results would be impressive now, let alone three centuries ago.

Today there’s a lot of lip service paid to the notion of staying nimble, but it’s often undercut by a ton of bureaucracy that seems unshiftable. On the other hand, sometimes ‘stay nimble’ simply operates as a euphemism for ‘regulation slows us down and we must get rid of it so we’re free to exploit workers and resources as we see fit’. The Golden-Age pirates show us something different. Their ability to achieve scale through collaboration is one of the most important lessons I believe they have to teach for our twenty-first-century adventures. And in our day and age, when digital networks offer limitless opportunity to crew up, band together or mutate, we have infinitely more ways to join our small groups together, find inspiration or best practice, gather more people, push for more access and create more change quicker.

Problems become solutions for pirates

There are hundreds if not thousands of groups all around the world experimenting in politics and activism, fundraising, retail and any other field you can think of, who are reorganizing themselves in a pirate-like way today.

In 2012 the Taiwanese government infuriated its people by telling them not to ‘waste time talking about their policies’ and the economic plan but instead get on with their daily toil which would benefit the economy from the bottom up. This patronizing political pat on the head for a population who had enjoyed democracy for only a few generations, was one step too far for a group of young computer programmers who decided to go pirate and began a smart underground tech-enabled rebellion that sparked Taiwan’s Sunflower Revolution. This group flipped the sluggish and out-of-date ruling power on its head by ‘forking’ it. They created parallel ‘forked’ websites for key government institutions and made their pretend sites more convincing, more compelling and ultimately more collaborative than the real ones, and in the process engaged hundreds of thousands of citizens, who arrived online to prove exactly how civic participation in public decision-making could operate if only you were serious about wanting it to happen. The Sunflower Revolution sparked a change in attitude and led to a different model of democracy being implemented in Taiwan. From the Accounting and Statistics Office running participatory budgeting processes to a mass civic deliberation on how to respond to the arrival of Uber, today Taiwan is at the forefront of a very different model of democracy as a result of getting ‘forked’. In 2018 it was ranked the most open government in the world at 90 per cent by the Global Open Data Index.8 (The UK is joint second with Australia at 79 per cent, USA is joint eleventh with Mexico at 65 per cent.) The small group of Taiwanese students who organized a digital coup caused good trouble and changed mainstream ideals for the better – one of the pioneers who set up the ‘forks’, Audrey Tang, now works on the inside as Digital Minister for Taiwan, the country’s first transgender minister. Taiwan’s digital and democratic pirates started something extraordinary, but they aren’t the only group of people looking to shake up politics and pull the rug from under the myth that only top-down scale, command-and-control, growth-or-die strategies are effective in politics or civic administration. Portugal created the world’s first national-scale participatory budgeting process and France wasn’t far behind, assigning over €100 million of government spending each year through deliberative digital democracy. In Iceland nearly half the population have participated in an online democracy platform since 2011 and the small Andalusian town of Jun’s citizens govern themselves almost entirely through Twitter. Even Mexico City, which has one of the biggest metropolitan populaces on earth, began to crowdsource its constitution in 2016 through change.org …

So far, so empowering, and so apparent that the tools of rebellion are available to us all. It’s been proved beyond a doubt that all over the world a pirate approach to reorganization coupled with clever use of technology can wrench power from the Establishment and place it in the hands of the people. But it’s not just self-interested governments that pirate principles applied to modern movements have been teaching a lesson.

In 2015 we realized that the world’s largest taxi firm, Uber, owns no cars; the world’s most popular media company, Facebook, creates no content; the world’s most valuable retailer, Alibaba, carries no stock; and the world’s largest accommodation provider, Airbnb, owns no property. It was actually internationally renowned marketing guru Tom Goodwin who first made this observation, since when the rest of the world has repeated it (and taken the credit for it) to each other a million times. Tom further observed that ‘something big is going on’, and he wasn’t wrong, although my contribution is that, in all these instances, big isn’t always better.

Tom disarmingly poked fun at the worldwide acclaim his (often unattributed) insight received when announcing his book Digital Darwinism: Survival of the Fittest in the Age of Business Disruption, tweeting: ‘You hated and are bored by the quote, now come tolerate the book.’ Lol. (It’s actually really good.)

After the initial international excitement that this new ‘sharing economy’ of Airbnb, Uber, Task Rabbit, Deliveroo and many others promised an enlightened, more community orientated way of doing business had subsided, the age-old accusations of tax avoidance, poor working conditions and negative impact on disrupted local economies all followed.

The dip in reputation of these new tech-enabled giants on the block followed that of their predecessors Facebook and Google, whose once bright promise that ‘technology will save us’ has perhaps shifted to ‘technology will make a fortune from our data and then dodge its taxes and avoid responsibility for abuses of its platform’, which may or may not be entirely fair, but is increasingly a perspective our potential tech saviours need to overcome.

All of a sudden, Tom’s ‘something big’ observation didn’t sound quite so beautiful.

Back out at the edges where pirates gather, a movement has started in response to this new evolution of big bad business under the guise of the ‘gig economy’. If history tells us anything, it’s that pirate movements in response to unfair systems start kicking at the edges but often end up becoming mainstream ideas over time.

Defying great odds, famed for flying in the face of unfairness and ultimately encouraging the Establishment to adopt their alternative ideas is the pirate approach to fix an unfair enemy, and, based on such a precedent, this could be an interesting conflict to watch. There are certainly some pirates beginning to gather in formation for this particular fight; they fly under a flag called platform cooperativism, and it’s pirate to its core.

This is how the movement describes itself: Platform cooperativism is a growing international movement that builds a fairer future of work. It’s about social justice and the bottom line. Rooted in democratic ownership, co-op members, technologists, unionists and freelancers create a concrete near-future alternative to the extractive sharing economy.

Making good on the early promise of the Web to decentralize the power of apps, protocols, and websites, platform co-ops allow households with low and volatile income to benefit from the shift of labor markets to the Internet. Steering clear of the belief in one-click fixes of social problems, the model is poised to vitalize people-centered innovation by joining the rich heritage and values of co-ops with emerging Internet technologies.9

Consider all the new big businesses we can’t imagine life without. I’m talking Amazon, Uber, eBay etc. Then take a look at the rapidly growing platform cooperative movement and you’ll be surprised to see that the apps you begrudgingly depend on for food delivery, car sharing, taxi hailing, house cleaning, stuff buying, old stuff auctioning, social networking and so on are all there in some form but reimagined, reorganized and made fair.

There’s a growing directory of platform cooperatives operating in most major markets. They’re definitely in their pirate stage – small, at the fringes, innovating, rebelling and rewriting rules – but they organize themselves and their power is growing. FairBnB does what the name suggests, providing an Airbnb alternative that’s owned by its users and paying a fair share to renters.

If you ever sympathized with #deleteuber but couldn’t bear to lose the convenience of the world’s biggest ‘ride hailing’ app, many major cities have a driver-owned alternative to Uber, from Alpha Taxis in Paris to Coop Cars in Toronto. And, as ever, because the pirates are exploring new ways of organizing at the edges, there’s innovation and imagination on fire, with multiple Blockchain powered platforms, others pushing the boundaries of property ownership, freelancers’ support systems adapting to the changing world of work and many more. As history shows, pirates have a tendency for accurately predicting future trends, and the platform coop directory to me feels like a glimpse into that future.

The coop platform people introduce themselves eloquently: ‘The Internet can be owned and governed differently. The experiments already underway show that a global ecosystem of cooperatives and unions, in collaboration with movements such as Free and Open Source Software, can stand against the concentration of wealth and the insecurity of workers that yields Silicon Valley’s winner-takes-all economy.’10

I doubt even pirate captain ‘Black’ Sam Bellamy, the rabble-rousing orator, could have said it better. If we’ve learned anything from pirate history so far, it’s that their ideas are, over time, adopted by the mainstream and therefore platforms such as these are ones to watch. My bet is that some of these cooperative-based apps are the platforms and market places of the future, the next iteration, and hopefully with their principles of fairness maintained whilst they also make their fortune.

In 2016, the idea that someone could take Facebook’s crown seemed unthinkably naive. Just a few years later, its reputation in toxic tatters, the promise of the platform cooperatives seems more in the ascendance than ever.

There are literally hundreds of thousands of small groups of people out there pushing their mini-mutinies, determined to cause big change. Whether they start as a WhatsApp group or in a bar, in an office or in a communal working space it doesn’t matter. A mutiny can be a beautiful thing where it allows fairness, creativity and change to flourish. At some point, though, if you want to continue to crew up, and find the modern version of Henry Morgan’s Call of the Brethren that brings thousands of pirates together to make the whole world listen, you’ll need to turn your mutiny into a networked movement, which these days means turning technology to your advantage.

How to turn a mutiny into a movement

One particularly inspiring and accessible example of a small team creating multiple mutinies influencing millions of people is Avaaz. Avaaz, meaning ‘voice’, as in what it gives to multiple issues every day, is a network of modern-day pirates with world-changing ideas of systems-level change. The Guardian newspaper describes them as ‘the globe’s largest and most powerful online activist network’.11 In his role as environmental campaigner, ex-Vice-President Al Gore has called them ‘inspiring’ and multiple government records released to the public reveal that ministers fear them. But Avaaz has also been accused of embodying Slacktivism, allowing people to cop out of real decision-making. So what is it, and who is behind it?

Avaaz calls itself a ‘campaigning community’ that uses the internet to bring together its tens of millions of members to debate, decide, choose and lead its campaigns. Its goals range from liberating journalists in oppressive regimes to protecting endangered species and much, much more besides.

Avaaz was launched in 2007 by a consortium of experienced watchmen of social injustice. It’s led by Ricken Patel, an accomplished expert in rebels, conflicts and corrupt systems who understands how to use the levers of power, politics and technology to manipulate and manage them all. Avaaz brings together a small but diverse team of highly skilled and talented people from all over the world and sets out to build a highly sophisticated digital platform that makes participation very easy. The concept is simple and speaks directly to what Margaret Wheatley told us was the way to build significant change in the twenty-first century. Don’t aim for big, aim for connected. Find or build a community of other people who care about the same things you do and act together to lobby, protest and insist.

With a massive membership in the tens of millions and a tiny core team, Avaaz routinely takes on seemingly insurmountable challenges and very often wins. By wielding the power of its network it often leaves rivals with two black eyes. In its own words: ‘From technology [comes] new nimbleness and flexibility … Instead of fragmenting, we grow – united by values.’12 It is mighty on an international scale, but nimble and efficient, meaning its campaigning power is ‘always on’, far beyond the influence of ordinary four-yearly election cycles. And talking of politics, Avaaz takes on all comers, from presidents to corrupt systems and major corporations. And all three, when they happen to be the same thing. Refusing any income from political parties or big business, it relies on small donations from its member base. From mobilizing the largest ever demonstration against climate change to rallying against some of the world’s least favourite businesses and their evil supervillain leaders, from Monsanto to Murdoch, whilst championing the rights of marine life, bees and refugees along the way, Avaaz backs the underdog, fights for what’s right, wins court cases, gets policy changed and influences the influencers.

As a demonstration of the pirate principle that nimble networks can collaborate to create scale with a strength to take on superpowers, the story speaks for itself. Currently Avaaz is running global campaigns with a team whose members are based in over thirty countries, using all available technology platforms to organize efficiently. Campaign ideas come from its millions of subscribers and are then shaped by a small team of experts. Ideas are refined extensively using agile techniques within a bespoke responsive testing community of 10,000 representative members. But they are not limited to digital campaigning, and often create real-world and physical events, such as a three-mile human handshake organized by the Dalai Lama from the Royal Albert Hall to the doors of the Chinese embassy in London, to represent and request both sides engage more meaningfully with one another.

If you want to test drive a monumental collaborative tool without taking the risk of leaving your house, just sign up to Avaaz; search the fights they are having on behalf of humanity and add your name to those you believe in. Watch the updates, subscribe to the social feeds and see how they leverage change. You’ll get a sense of how a modern-day pirate-like network works alongside 44 million other crew members. If you really want to see how powerfully pirate Avaaz can be, start a campaign yourself. It’s free, incredibly quick and puts you in touch with crew members like yourself who are amassing global communities against deforestation, restrictive internet freedoms, political corruption or the commercial development of local public spaces. At the very least, try joining someone else’s crew or campaign for a while and take inspiration as you join in a fight you’d probably never be able to win alone. Avaaz really stacks up as an exemplary pirate organizer. Its political- and social-activist platforms are predicated on staying small as a team and taking direction from members on matters of policy, crewing up as necessary to take on the world’s biggest challenges through an agile network. The organization has been built on the founding pirate principles of the two previous chapters. Patel and his followers are fearless rebels when it comes to defying corporations and corrupt politicians and they rewrote the rule that insisted online petitions were a waste of time. They have inspired many more platforms to follow them. They may not be perfect, and many would argue they’re far from it, but I’m convinced they indicate a new way of engaging with issues that’s here to stay, and that will grow. The idea of platforms like these, the technology they’re based on using, the victories they’ve begun to win, all of it is just at the beginning of their potential. As Avaaz and the other platforms doing very similar work evolve and, like pirates, continue to influence the mainstream, it’s surely a safe bet that this sort of platform participation in politics and society is going to become more and more prevalent. Avaaz’s work is governed by pirate principles playing out three hundred years on, standing up to the same sorts of unfair systems, dodgy big business and untrustworthy leaders, whilst giving voice to those who don’t have one. The similarities seem clear, the lessons look valuable. No shortage of world leaders are on record as taking notice. National letdown and former prime minister of the UK Gordon Brown said, ‘Avaaz has driven forward the idealism of the world … do not underestimate your impact on leaders … you rascally wee pirates.’ OK, so he didn’t say the very last bit, but the rest is true.

Dead ahead

You’re now bristling with examples of how pirates both vintage and contemporary have grown their mutinies into movements, harnessed the power of small groups and crewed up and down as required through the power of networks. The Golden-Age pirates turned the navy’s way of organizing on its head and in the process invented extraordinarily responsive, agile and nimble structures long before such buzzwords were even dreamt of, let alone considered best practice. Starting from the principle that says big is no longer better and small groups are powerful, even more so when they network, we’ve looked at how you can reorganize yourself from the outset to create radical change, not cancerous growth.

If we’re going to ride the stormy seas ahead we need all the pointers we can get. Change and challenge are constants and the way we organize ourselves to meet them is going to be crucial as we navigate the twenty-first century. The skills we need to do so are going to look increasingly different, too.

In our accelerating world, the other end of the argument that we need to organize ourselves differently is not just about the best way of operating at a macro scale, it’s also about the micro scale. In particular the optimum size of organizations, and how it appears to be shrinking.

In 1965, Standard and Poor’s index of American businesses registered that the average life expectancy of firms was sixty-five years. Fifty years later, in 2015, this had dropped to a fifteen-year average life expectancy. If the trend continues in even the crudest way then by 2025 the lifetime of the average company could hit somewhere near five years.

The flipside of that statistic is the rapid increase in business birth rates. Taking the UK this time as a proxy, but following the same time frame, from the 1960s to 2015, the volume of operating businesses rose from 750,000 to over 5 million. By 2025, on a similar trajectory, we’ll be looking at 7 million, or one business for every ten people.

The US and the UK are fairly reliable proxies for what seems to be a global trend, where it’s clear that, in the coming years, many more organizations will exist for much shorter periods of time, making the importance of collaboration and networks to achieve solutions at scale increasingly important.

We’re all set for faster, bolder, shorter adventures. Where once there was hierarchical structure, a long slow climb up the career ladder, a culture of internal competition combined with deference to remote leaders, bureaucracy and that’s-just-how-it-is attitudes, there will now be collaborative skills, responsive mechanisms and shared principles to live and die by. Put like that, the future sure sounds a lot like the true history of the Golden-Age of pirates.