I am a pirate

The Pirate Party fights for transparency, anonymity and sensible copyright laws. At TEDxOslo, Rick Falkvinge explains how he became the leader of Europe's tech-driven political party, which so far has won 17 seats across national parliaments in Europe.

Thank y'all!

This is going to be a motivational speech.

Because --

imagine my motivation standing
between this strong, healthy crowd ...

and lunch.

(Laughter)

So ...

I'm @Falkvinge on Twitter.

Feel free to quote me if I say something
memorable, stupid, funny, whatever.

I love seeing my name on Twitter.

So ...

Hi! I'm Rick.

I'm a politician.

I'm sorry.

How many in here have heard
of the Swedish Pirate Party before?

Let's see a show of hands.

OK, that's practically everybody.

Probably due to the fact
that we are Sweden's neighbor.

I frequently ask how many have heard
of any other political party

and there's always
just scattered hands in the audience

compared to this first question
which is one-half to two-thirds.

This is actually the first time ever
that does not match.

It was practically everybody.

So, for those who haven't heard of us:

well, the Pirate Party, we love the net.

We love copying and sharing,
and we love civil liberties.

For that, some people call us pirates.

Probably in an attempt to make us
bow our heads and feel shame.

That didn't work very well.

We decided to stand tall about it instead.

And so in 2006,
I founded a new political party.

I led it for its first five years.

And the European elections,
the last European elections,

we became the largest party

and the most coveted
youth demographic, sub-30.

And what's interesting is we did that

on less than one percent
of the competition's budget.

We had a campaign budget
total of 50,000 euros.

They had six million between them --
and we beat them.

That gave us a cost efficiency advantage
of over two orders of magnitude.

And I'm gonna share
the secret recipe of how we did that.

We developed swarm methodologies.

And they can be applied
to any business or social cause.

Well, almost any --

there's a small asterisk by the end,

and I'll get to that in just a minute.

But applying these --

and we've done this dozens of times,
we know that this works.

We've put two people
in the European Parliament,

we have 45 people
in various German state parliaments,

we're in the Icelandic parliament,
the Czech senate,

many, many, many more, local councils --

and, as said, we've spread
to 70 countries.

And that's not bad
for a political movement

that hasn't even been around for a decade.

So today we're going
to talk a bit about --

how people are motivated
to be part of change,

to be part of something
bigger than themselves.

And how you can channel this
into an organization

that harnesses this great power of wanting
to make the world a better place.

And in the end,
come out a little on the better.

When I speak to businesspeople,
I frequently make them very upset

when I contradict them

and say that no, your employees
are not your most valuable asset.

Your most valuable asset
is the thousands of people

who want to work for you for free.

And you don't let them.

They get very upset about that.

A swarm is a congregation
of tens of thousands of volunteers

that have chosen of their own will
to converge on a common goal.

There's this "Futurama" quote:

"When push comes to shove,
you gotta do what you love --

even if it's not a good idea."

(Laughter)

I mean, seriously,
what kind of idiot thinks

they can change the world
by starting a political party?

(Laughter)

This kind of idiot, apparently.

But it works!

What you need to do
is to put a stake in the ground.

You need to announce your goal.

Just say, "I want to accomplish this."

I'm going to do this.

And it doesn't need to be very costly.

My announcement was
just two lines in a chat channel.

"Hey, look, the Pirate Party
has its website up now after New Year's."

And the address.

That was all the advertising I ever did.

The next time I had several hundred
activists wanting to work with us.

When you provide such a focus point,

a swarm intelligence emerges.

When people can rally to a flag.

And that's what gives you this two orders
of magnitude of cost efficiency.

It's a huge advantage --

you're running circles
around all the legacy organizations.

And there are four goals
that need to be fulfilled in your goal

in order for this to work.

These four criteria
are that your goal must be:

tangible, credible, inclusive and epic.

Let's take a look at them:
It needs to be tangible.

A lot of people say,

"Well, you know, we should make
the world a better place,"

or, "Yeah, we should all feel good now."

Not going to work.

You need a binary.

Are we there yet, or are we not there yet?

It needs to be credible.

Somebody seeing the project plan
that you're posting needs to see

that, yes, this project plan will take us

from where we are to where we want to be.

You need to break it down into subgoals

that each by themselves
are seen as doable,

and when you add the subgoals together,

we've gone to where we want.

It needs to be --

and this is where it gets exciting
in terms of working swarmwise --

it needs to be inclusive.

Anybody who sees this project plan
needs to immediately say,

"I want to do this --
and there's my spot!"

And they will be able
to jump right into the project

and start working on it
without asking anybody's permission.

And that is exactly what'll happen.

And, last but not least,
it needs to be epic.

It needs to energize people.
It needs to electrify people.

Shoot for the moon!

On second thought,
don't shoot for the moon,

we've already been there --
shoot for Mars!

(Laughter)

In contrast,

you will never be able
to get a volunteer swarm forming

around making the most
correct tax audit ever.

Doesn't electrify people. Go to Mars.

A lot of people
kind of balk at the obstacles.

We're going to climb a huge mountain.

So how do you motivate people to do that?

Well, it turns out
that obstacles are not the problem.

Not knowing the obstacles is the problem.

If you know how high the mountain is,

you know exactly
what it takes to scale it.

We know exactly how far away Mars is
and what it takes to get there.

If you can plan it like a project,

you can plan what resources you need

and you can execute it,
exactly like a project.

Let's see: we're going to Mars,

we need two dozen
volunteer rocket scientists,

one dozen volunteer metallurgists,

some crazy dude who will mix
rocket fuel in his backyard

and so on.

When you can list the resources,
you know what you need to get there.

When you know what you need
to get there, you can go there.

And the next thing is to encourage
this development of a swarm intelligence,

which is where
the cost efficiency comes in.

There's a TED Talk on motivation
that debunks that we work for money,

and it presents science on how
we're really motivated by three things,

in terms of larger creative tasks,

when we work for something
bigger than ourselves.

We work for autonomy, mastery and purpose.

We've covered purpose already.

As in, working for something bigger,
tangible, credible, inclusive and epic.

So, where that motivation talk ends,

what it doesn't answer is,

how do you build an organization
that harnesses this motivational power.

And this is where
working swarmwise comes in,

this is where swarm intelligence comes in.

Turns out that there are three factors
that you optimize for --

and each of these are in complete opposite
to what you learn at a business school.

But it works.

We know it works.

We have people in many, many
parliaments to prove it.

Those three factors are:
speed, trust and scalability.

We optimize for speed
by cutting bottlenecks out of the loop,

cutting them out of the decision loop.

That means cutting yourself
out of the decision loop,

which can be hard.

But you've got to communicate your vision
so passionately, so strongly,

that everybody knows what the goal is

and can find something, some step

that takes the movement
just a little closer to that goal.

And when tens of thousands of people
do that on a weekly basis,

you become an unstoppable force.

We had a three-person rule
in our organization,

saying that if three self-identified
volunteers in the movement

were in agreement that something
was good for the movement,

they had the green light
from the highest office

to go ahead and act
in the name of the organization,

including spending resources.

When you talk about
this kind of empowerment

to traditional businesspeople,

they think you belong in a zoo.

But you know what?

I led this organization for five years,

there were 50,000 registered members

and many, many more anonymous activists.

It was not abused once.

Everybody had the key
to the treasure chest.

It was not abused one single time.

Turns out when you give people
the keys to the castle,

and look them in the eye
and say, "I trust you,"

they step up to the plate.

And that's a beautiful thing
to see happen.

Obviously, not everything
went according to plan,

but that's a different thing.

We made mistakes.
We should expect mistakes.

If you're pioneering something,
that means you must, by definition,

venture into the unknown.

When you're trying the unknown,
some things won't go as planned.

That's part of the definition
of venturing into the unknown.

To find the great,
you must allow mistakes to happen.

So you must communicate
that we expect some things to go wrong

to create a risk-positive environment.

Therefore we optimize for iteration speed.

Meaning that we try, we fail,
we try again, we fail faster,

we fail better, we try again,
we fail better again.

Maybe after we've tried 15 times,
we've mastered some specific subject,

so you want to minimize the time
it takes to try those 15 times.

We optimize on trust.
We encourage diversity.

You need to communicate
your vision so strongly

so that everybody can translate it
into their own context

because language is an incredibly strong

inclusionary and exclusionary
social marker.

This one-brand-fits-all message --

forget it!

That's what they teach you
at business school -- it doesn't work.

Or at least, it doesn't give you
the cost-efficiency advantage

of working swarmwise.

This leads to a lot of different
approaches tried in parallel

in different social groups

who try out different methods
of working toward the goal.

Some of them will work

but in order to find the great ones,
you need this diversity.

And you need to communicate
that we need that diversity.

If somebody on this side
does not understand

what those guys are doing,

that's OK because we all trust each other
to work for the better of the movement.

And it's OK that I don't understand
their social context.

I'm not expected to --
I understand my social context.

I contribute with something I know.

Make people aware of this diversity.

Finally, scalability.
Get feet on the ground.

Again, in business school,
they teach you to use a lean organization.

Forget that.

Just scale up the organization
from the get-go.

Start with 10,000 empty boxes
and an org chart

covering down to every minor city.

When you have lots and lots
of small responsibilities

in such a scaffolding
that supports the swarm,

supports the activists,

you'll find that these boxes
in the org charts

are getting filled in quite rapidly,

and they start to get filled in
beyond your horizon

with people you've never heard of.

And so, this swarm keeps growing
to tens of thousands of people,

each taking on something small
with very, very decentralized mandate

to act on the organization.

And this is when
a swarm intelligence emerges.

This is when you have this beehive logic
where everybody knows what's to be done.

Everybody is taking
their own small steps towards it.

So the swarm starts to act
as a coherent organism.

And it's amazing to watch.

This is when you're awarded
by the cost-efficiency advantage

over your competitors

by two orders of magnitude.

Two orders of magnitude.

This is not just a silver bullet.

So we've been talking a lot
about the big picture today.

You can use these swarm methods
for a lot of stuff.

Do you want to change the world?

Do you want to bring clean water
to a billion people?

Teach three billion people to read?

Maybe you're into social change;

you want to introduce
unconditional basic income.

Or maybe you want
to take humanity to Mars.

You can do this using these methods.

You can do this.

It's about leadership.

It's about deciding what you want to do
and telling it to the world.

Because no matter whether you think
you can or cannot change the world,

no matter whether you think
you can or cannot change the world,

you are probably right.

So one question I want everybody here
to ask themselves today

is the observation that change doesn't
just happen, somebody makes it happen --

do you want to be that person?

Do you want to be that person?

And then one last thing:

There's one component more
that's required to work swarmwise

that I haven't mentioned yet.

And that is fun.

This goes beyond just enjoying your job,

this goes beyond having
a pinball machine in the office.

Because this is actually required
to succeed in a swarmwise scenario.

This is required to succeed

to get that cost-efficiency advantage
of two orders of magnitude.

For the reason that you need
to attract volunteers.

And people, in this aspect,
are rather predictable.

People will go to other people
who are having fun.

In contrast, they will walk an extra mile
to avoid people who are not having fun.

So, having fun is more than just
having a pinball machine in the office.

It's an absolute
and unavoidable requirement

for organizational and operational success
when you're working swarmwise.

So, in summary --

a recipe for a swarm organization

using these motivational methods
to a huge competitive advantage.

Your goal: it needs to be tangible,
credible, inclusive and epic.

Your organization needs to be optimized
for speed, trust and scalability.

You need to enjoy yourselves.

And that will reward you

with two orders of magnitude
of cost-efficiency advantage.

Thank you.

(Applause)