Sam Conniff is the award winning author of Be More Pirate, a book and movement that is inspiring people and teams everywhere to learn how pirate crews worked together on clear missions. Alex Barker, who works closely with Sam, will be joining us at the Nesta Health 2019, our annual health summit that this year focusses on reimagining leadership. The Be More Pirate crew and health and care leaders they have worked with will be at Nesta Health 2019 to share how their approach has shifted how they work, what impact it has had, and embolden attendees to Be More Pirate in their own settings.

When I wrote Be More Pirate, I never for a minute envisaged that it would be anything more than an outlet for my frustrations about the world.

It turned out, a lot of other people were frustrated too.

In the response to the book, I discovered hundreds of self-identifying pirates offering up details of their resignations and rebellions, and from here, a simple truth emerged: in order to actually get stuff done at work, you have to break some rules.

This is what I have begun calling ‘professional rule breaking’, and I’m now convinced that it is the one skill we must all develop at speed.

Out of all the messages I received, the loudest, boldest cry came from health and social care with their assertion that the whole system, from the NHS through to local councils and charities, is in danger of eating itself. Layers of management, wasteful bureaucracy and a deference to data, are creating physical and psychological barriers between citizens and the professionals working really hard to support them.

All the while, the scale of future healthcare challenges becomes ever more daunting. Earlier this year, the Department for Health and Social Care launched a five year vision on how to tackle the spread of antibiotic resistance in the UK. The current climate change trajectory and the movement of people across the world mean that this is less of an if, and more of a when.

The problems are big, bad and borderless, so we must be the same. We must cultivate a new way of working.

The interesting thing about the Golden Age Pirates, is that they pioneered a workplace culture that is rare today: light on resources but imbued with high levels of trust, accountability, fairness and transparency. This was entirely necessary in order to avoid conflict, and had the added benefit of allowing pirates to find consensus easily and act quickly.

The point here is that culture - the human stuff - matters. It really matters, far more that strategy. It is the glue that will determine whether future technology works for or against us, and whether we can effectively work together amid political turmoil.

This is the message I have heard repeatedly from our healthcare pirates. It’s been a pleasure to see the efforts of people like Naomi Davies, Cat Duncan-Rees, Claire Tomkinson and Kath Smythe, use Be More Pirate as a banner to give more people permission to say no: I will not do it this way anymore because it doesn’t work.

In reclaiming our agency, no matter where we sit in the system, we will give way to a new breed of leaders who are essential in bringing about a shift in work culture. As Claire has described them:

“…the people that everyone knows, everyone trusts and that can bring people together, not through their authority, but through their vision and their ability to recognise a shared purpose or common cause.

They talk about values, relationships, behaviours and trust and how you can’t achieve anything without these, but they are the things that we talk about least when most of the conversations in meetings revolve around structures, governance, action logs and strategies.”

In practice, this is really hard. Shifting power, breaking down silos and talking about empathy over analytics, will feel deeply uncomfortable. You will feel like you are wrong, everyone is against you and you should give up. But, this is when you should keep going.

If that feels like too big an ask I would say this: professional rule breaking is not really a call to rebel, it is a call to our sense of individual responsibility. When the rules are well past their sell-by date, the compounding effect is that the system breaks. In real terms, more and more people suffer. Which side are you going to be on?