Sam's Pirate Code 2.0

Direct from the book, here are the Articles of Sam’s Conniff Allende’s Pirate Code 2.0

Article 1 - Make Shit Up

All captains and crews profoundly expect, respect, celebrate and appreciate the art of strategically , structurally, intuitively and instantly making shit up. Not irresponsible imaginings, reckless reimaginings and certainly not false or fake news. We champion creative solution finding and positive problem solving baed on available facts, the moment of opportunity and power of practised intuition. When indecision is not an option, when change is constant and nothing is normal, we’re proudly comfortable to rationally and rapidly develop, test and implement solutions on the spot. We learn from our mistakes, even if we don’t celebrate them, and use them to make it up better.

Article 2 - Business Plans are dead

We challenge a century-old static format as the best structure for the fluid future of our organizations, projects, dreams, and schemes. We believe in a motivating manifesto that makes clear our vision and we follow a concise but responsive roadmap with agile measures of accountability. We believe in collaborative ‘working’ and adaptive formats that are regularly used and reviewed in collaboration with not just the whole crew but even our customers, beneficiaries and stakeholders, to openly evaluate success, failure and future scenario planning. No captain will produce a plan for only a narrow audience, or a moment in time, only for it to gather dust in an inbox, ignored or unused by the crew.

Article 3 - Make the citizen shift

It’s time to evolve the human race beyond the mindset of solely a ‘consumer’ and the dangerous, destructive and limited relationships it has created. We will perform a forced reset on the language of consumerism that in turn will help us to develop more interesting, involved, interactive, mutually respectful and naturally more beneficial, rewarding relationships between our organisations, audiences and the finite resources of our world. All pirates undertake to advance the evolution of the idea of ‘the citizen’ as the dominant defining though ot our audiences and communities, and of our future.

Article 4 - take happiness seriously

We take happiness seriously and give deep happiness the place and importance it deserves. We see happiness as a strategic driver for success, productivity and creative output but also as a strategic objective in and of itself. We do not believe happiness is a nice-to-have, we believe it is a need-to-have. We make happiness a starting point not just an end point; we used our intention to achieve happiness to inform the decisions we make, the environments we create and the projects we undertake. We endeavour to measure, manage and share the proof we accumulate that happiness is symbiotic with great work, great impact, great relationships and greater ineffectiveness. We do not confirm to a one size fits all happiness, not expect to be happy every day but accept and respect the right to make happiness the goal.

Article 5 - adopt the new work manifesto

We want to love work, we want to learn as we work, we want to be proud of what we do and have the chance to do it well. We want work to make us better not worse. We want the rewards of creativity, friendships, fulfilment and knowledge to match the financial compensation we need. We want life/work balances, not the other way around. We intend to live up to the promise of technology, efficiency and flexibility. We commit to understanding our own inner engineering for effectiveness and refuse to submit to conditions, clocks or cultures that don’t get the best out of us. We will break the tyranny of emails, meetings, to-do lists and any other anachronistic trappings of an old way of working, if they don’t work for us and we won’t stop until we’re judged on our output, not our input.