WhatComesNext.Live: Alex Barker

Right Hand Pirate, Author, Facilitator, Builder of Networks

July 7, 2020

Alex has recently written a new book around how businesses and organisations have lived the “Pirate Code”. During lockdown, she has also stepped forward as a leader through countless online events supporting building networks and communities.

Find out more about Alex at bemorepirate.com or follow her on Twitter @AlexandraBarke1.

Key takeaways:

• Being a Pirate is a way of being, with the Pirate Code (to me) being a set of values and behaviours to inform any decision. Examples included: Transparency, Equal Pay, Equal Say, Inclusion
• Being more Pirate is also about breaking the rules, yet, in our working lives, Alex recommends “small bold actions”.
• When is a small action bold? When you feel nervous, but can push past your personal fears and send that email, speak up in that meeting (or, in the context of anti-racism, call out family, friends, colleagues, or even ask others to call you out when you do or say something on or over the line)
• The groundwork that allows you to both take small bold actions and to be resilient in traumatic times is, informed by the Pirate Code, about a) knowing your own values, and b) being aware of your limits.

References included:

• Market Force and their definition of a team as a “group of disagreeable people aligned around a common purpose”
• Nicholas Nassim Taleb wrote “Anti-Fragile” some years ago. In these times, perhaps more leaders can design and build (or modify) their organisations such that they thrive in times of chaos and uncertainty, to be the opposite of fragile, or “anti-fragile”
• Ikigai, the Japanese sense of alignment from doing a) what you love, b) what you are good at, c) what the world needs, and d) what you can be paid for.

For much of my references in the show, search on those terms and I will have written about it in the ~1,000 daily blogs.