The agile pirate

As a scrum master or coach, it is essential to tell stories. Stories can explain abstract concepts and reasons for decisions, and they are just another tool for spreading agility throughout the firm. Today, on the blog, I want to discuss a story I often use to explain agility to an organization.  

I have been a big fan of the book "Teach Like a Pirate," from Dave Burgess.  It discusses the off-beat techniques one teacher uses to get high school students to learn.  It includes plenty of helpful advice to maintain enthusiasm, deal with challenging students, and create an accommodating learning environment. He uses the term "teach like a pirate" because it is a non-standard way to educate children.  I have taken Burgess's guidance and merged it into my coaching practice.   I have also authored a blog on how it informs my outlook.  

I learned a story in the press about Steve Jobs.  In 1983, Macintosh's engineering team was struggling.  Jobs then brought the team to an off-site leadership meeting where he gave a pet talk, saying, "It is better to be a pirate than to join the navy." After the weekend meeting, the engineers returned to Apple headquarters and raised a modified pirate flag over the office.  It was the traditional skull and crossbones with a twist.  Instead of a conventional eye patch, it has the Apple logo with rainbow stripes.  The flag would fly over the engineering building for Macintosh for over a year.  Jobs would point it out to visitors.  When the company celebrated its fortieth anniversary in 2016, Jobs had been dead for five years, but the pirate flag flew again; the buccaneering spirit he inspired in the organization still lingered.  I imagine his approval in the afterlife at this gesture.  

The story has stuck with me ever since I discovered it.  The pirate of Robert Louis Stevenson and contemporary Hollywood is a colorful rebellious creature who lives outside the rules of conventional society.  Pirates are outlaws beholden to no one but themselves.  A pirate is an ultimate survivor willing to fight and die for their shipmates.  It is a lifestyle that often ended at the end of a noose or the point of a sword, but while alive, a pirate was living a way of life that few people could imagine.

I do love the swashbuckling nature of pirates.  I also see it as an inspiration for the teams I serve.  I often joke the development teams are a merry band of pirates attempting to make a living on the high seas.  I encourage people to take calculated risks to innovate and please the customer.  It is not the precise control of a corporate environment.  Instead, it is the collegial environment of skilled professionals working nimbly and collaboratively for swift rewards.  

So here I am, leading an agile transformation and a group of talented people.  I did not expect this from my career ten years ago, and certainly not when I graduated from college.  It is a pirate's life, and I will go where the wind and the seas will take me.