BE MORE PIRATE
Will Turner: “If we can outrun her, we can take her. We should turn and fight.”
Captain Jack Sparrow: “Why fight when you can negotiate?”
(from Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest[1]).
In January 1983, Steve Jobs gathered a group of Apple employees at a retreat in Carmel, California during which Jobs offered a maxim meant to motivate the developers: “It’s better to be a pirate than join the navy.” According to one of the original members of the development team, Andy Hertzfeld, “Being a pirate meant moving fast, unencumbered by bureaucracy and politics. It meant being audacious and courageous, willing to take considerable risks for greater rewards.”[2]
A significant trend in destination development that has been identified over the past five years, and it is one that is likely to be fuelled by the post-pandemic paradigm shifts explored elsewhere in this book. It is the emergence of, what has been termed ‘the new pirates’ (Stevens, 2020a; Stevens, 2020b). These are genuinely original and self-made individuals who are developing innovative, surprising, and inspiring ideas for destination development. They appear to be more pirate in their mindset with a willingness to think differently, to challenge and be challenged, and to stop asking for permission to do what they intuitively know what is right and good for a destination.
These new pirates can be found in some of the stand-out destinations in Europe where this phenomenon appears to be well established, notably in South Somerset (England), Istria (Croatia), The Brda Hills (Slovenia), Saalfelden-Leogang (Austria), and Vadehavskysten (Denmark).
The analogy of the pirate as representing this new generation of tourism investors, innovators and developers emerged from exploring the life and times of the erstwhile pirate, buccaneer, and explorer, William Dampier (1651 – 1715) born in rural Somerset in the village of East Coker, England (1). The spirit of the pirate was also found to be omnipresent in the creative arts and music communities that were established around the world at various times over the past two hundred years.
Let us begin with the pirate analogy. It seems that what we have monitored as, apparently quite random acts of innovative tourism development by enlightened individuals around the world who we have referenced as ‘the new pirates’ does have relevance and legitimacy in current thinking about sustainable economic development.
Writing in Scientific America, Michael Shermer’s 2009 article, Pirate Economics?: Captain Hook Meets Adam Smith: Debunking pirate myths reveals how hidden economic forces generate social order[3] examines the thinking presented by Leeson in his myth-busting book, The Invisible Hook (2009). In the book, Leeson argues that the commonly held view that pirates were notoriously thieves, traitors, and terrorists who ignored the conventional laws of the sea in an anarchic manner, fails to recognise how unseen hand of economic exchange produces social cohesion even among pirates. Leeson says pirate life was “orderly and honest” and had to be to meet buccaneers’ economic goal of turning a profit reflecting Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments of 1759.
Pirate societies, in fact, provide evidence for Smith’s theory that economies are the result of spontaneous, often self-organized, order that naturally arises from enhanced social interactions, as opposed to top-down bureaucratic design. Leeson shows how pirate communities democratically elected their captains and constructed constitutions. All pirates were obliged to sign their Articles of Agreement to prevent disputes. It was in everyone’s economic interest to negotiate the transactions as quickly and peacefully as possible for mutual benefit.
In 2019, the UK’s National Endowment for Science, Technology, and the Arts[4] (NESTA) published a blog entitled Does Our Economy Require More Pirates?[5] The blog begins with the statement that “the pirates of the Golden Age of Piracy were some of the most radical political and economic actors of the 17th and 18th Centuries” suggesting that “it is definitely time to explore how we can be more pirate.”
The authors then identify the core characteristics of how to run a company like a pirate – characteristics that are extremely relevant to the re-growth of tourism and redolent of the new generation of pirates who are increasingly driving this re-growth – these include: fair wages for all employees, concern for the wider community, open membership, a belief in democracy, education and meritocracy. NESTA suggests that it is no wonder that social engineers, like Sam Conliff Allende[6], urge tourism entrepreneurs to “be more pirate” – the title of his 2018 best-selling book.
Conliff reflects on the nexus that led to the emergence of the Golden Age of Piracy noting: (i) the engrained self-interested establishment and (ii) a broken economic system resulting in certain uncertainty Pirates didn’t just break the rules, they rewrote them. They didn’t just reject society, they reinvented it. Their innovation, social leadership, and rule-breaking ways were a powerful way to enact change and challenge the status quo. For Conliff, to be more pirate today needs “professional rule breaking’. Professional rule breakers are the modern equivalent of those historical buccaneers. They don’t operate alone: the recruit a crew of others with similar beliefs, shared values, and who hold each other to the account on the success of their mutiny.
In summary, Conliff identifies four steps ‘to be more pirate’. All four are relevant to the post-COVID era of sustainable tourism development. They are:
1. Break a rule: crucially, this should be a rule that shouldn’t exist in the first place: one that’s been executed with minimal thought and still somehow exists. See what happens... probably not much.
2. Start a mutiny: there will be a need to put something in place of the rule you’ve just broken – and recruit other people to follow you and start your own mutiny.
3. Be agile: pirates weren’t successful because they relied on systems that slowed them down. They made their decisions quickly based on values and principles, making them dynamic and responsive.
4. Redistribute your own power: pirates devolved power to the rest of the ship and make sure your decisions can be challenged by the juniors on your team, who might have creative ideas of their own.
These attributes of the pirate-related business concepts closely mirror those evident in the flourishing creative and artistic clusters that gave birth to a generation of niche destinations at various times over the past one hundred years in locations around the world. These creative, cluster-based, destinations include the artistic communities in Kirkcudbright (Scotland); Rovinj (Croatia), Skagen (Denmark), Cornwall (England), Montsalvat (Australia), and Sedona (USA); together with the clusters of poets and philosophers who gathered in Swansea in the 1950s; and the rock communities of Woodstock and Laurel Canyon (USA) in the late 1960’s.
This research by Stevens & Associates identified four dominant concepts in these creative clusters that can be combined with Conliff’s to be more pirate making them also relevant to the future of destination management. They are:
• COMMUNITAS: inspired fellowship, a group’s pleasure in sharing common experiences; a social unit who have something in common; an unstructured (anti-structure) community in which everyone is equal; developing an intimacy amongst people who experience liminality; and existential and spontaneous innovation (Esposito, 2009; Turner, 2012).
• LIMINALITY: located at a threshold; at the border, the edge both metaphorically and physically (of place and society); shifting from normal modes of societal actions; entering a period of scrutiny of central values; normal limits of self-discovery and behaviour are undone; the very structure of society of suspended, de-constructed; new things encouraged and nurtured; anti-structures appear; and the fault lines of legitimate and illegitimate blur (van Gennep, 1906).
• FLOW PSYCHOLOGY: a state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else matters; the experience is so enjoyable that people continue to do it even at great cost; the best moments of our lives occur if the mind and body are stretched to the limit; this is vital to creativity and well-being and is vital to self-actualization (eudaimonia) the antidote to hedonia (Csikszentimihlyi, 1990).
• KNOWLEDGE EXCHANGE: a process that, rather like the triple helix of innovation, brings together different groups and disciplines to exchange ideas, evidence, and expertise to advance understanding and improve the environment that will stimulate success, enterprise, innovation, and creativity (Williams et al, 2017; McTiernan et al 2018).
So, in this era of re-imagining and re-growing tourism there is scope for all of us involved and destination development to be more pirate in our approach and revel in the chance to work in different, more inclusive, innovative and hybrid ways. This call for change reflects the paradigm shifts described in COMM(UNITY) & THE NEW DESTINATION MANAGEMENT PARADIGM: SHIFTING THE BALANCE OF RESPONS(USTAIN)ABILITY also by this author.
Importantly, this approach resonates with the recommendations of seminal work on tourism destination development by Clare Gunn at the University of Austin in Texas some 50 years ago. In Vacationscape, Gunn sets out a clear manifesto to guide sustainable tourism destination development that is still relevant today. He writes: “All tourism designers and developers should have a sharper and broader consciousness of visitors as a whole in their total environment. The emphasis on each individual project is natural and even essential if it is to succeed but recognition of the personal desires, habits, and tastes of users and how all this is accommodated in some larger (regional) environmental context is even more crucial. All participants (stakeholders) must be satisfied, or the development has failed. As a result, there needs to be a regional framework to provide a new base for creative tourism design and the development of regions and destinations..”
REFERENCES
Conliff, S.A. 2018. Be More Pirate. Penguin Random House.
Csikszentimihlyi, M. 1990. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Harper and Row.
Esposito, R. 2009. Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Communities. Stanford University Press.
Gill, A. 1997. The Devil’s Mariner: William Dampier, Pirate and Explorer. Penguin Books. London.
Gunn, C. A. 1972. Vacationscape. University of Texas, Austin Press.
McTiernan, C. et al. 2018. Focusing on knowledge exchange: The role of trust.
Preston, M. and Preston, D. 2004. A Pirate of Exquisite Mind: The Life of William Dampier, Explorer, Naturalist and Buccaneer. Transworld Books. London.
Stevens, T. 2020a. The Coker Canvas Cluster of Sail and Rope Making; Bucked in the year, not in the piece. CRS Monograph No. 7. May. The Coker Rope and Sail Trust. West Coker, Somerset.
Stevens, T. 2020b. Wish You Were Here: The stories behind 50 of the world’s great destinations. GRAFFEG. Cardiff.
Turner, R. 2012. Communitas: The Anthology of Collective Joy. Palgrave. London.
Van Gennep, A. 1960. The Rites of Passage. The Chicago Press.
Williams, A et al. 2017. Trust, Networking and Knowledge Exchange. The Hidden Story.
[1] Buena Vista Pictures 2006 film directed by Gore Verbinski.
[2] Reported on www.qz.com by Sarah Todd, October 22, 2019, in The Book of Jobs blog.
[3] Michael Shermer is publisher of Skeptic magazine (www.skeptic.com) and author of The Mind of the Market.
[4] Nesta (formerly NESTA, National Endowment for Science, Technology, and the Arts) is an innovation foundation based in the UK. The organisation acts through a combination of programmes, investment, policy and research, and the formation of partnerships to promote innovation across a broad range of sectors. www.nesta.org.uk
[5] Alli, A. and Lloyd, J. 14th February 2019. www.nesta.org.uk
