 Good morning Brighton. I'm Rick. I'm a politician. I'm sorry, but there's a lesson or two that I learned in starting this political movement that I'd like to share with you today in how you motivate people and how you can create a really, really cost-efficient movement capable of changing the world. But before we start, if there's something I say, I love seeing my name on Twitter, that is memorable, funny, or just stupid, I love seeing it afterwards. Let's begin. How many here have heard of the Swedish pirate party before? Let's see a show of hands. Okay, so that's about half to two-thirds, I'll say. Interestingly enough, that's very consistent wherever I present in the world, whether it's in Tokyo, San Francisco, so I dare put it in the slides. So in contrast, just for kicks, let's see how many in here have heard of any other Swedish political party? One, two, three, yeah. So there's a lesson there, right? So for those of you who haven't heard of us, a brief introduction. We love the net, we love copying and sharing, and we love civil liberties. For that, some people decided to brand us pirates, thinking we'd bow our head in shame and feel bad about it. We didn't do that, we decided to stand tall about it and reclaimed the name. So I founded a new political party, led it for the first five years, and it turned out that we became the largest party in the most coveted youth demographic. Not only that, but we did that on less than one percent of the competition's budget. We had 50,000 euros in our campaign budget, they had six million between them, and we beat them. We did that by developing new swarm methodologies that encouraged people to just go ahead and change the world without asking anybody, and these methods can be applied to any business or social cause. Well, almost any. There's a small asterisk there, but I'll get to that. And today is about that secret source. Using this, we've now put two people in the European Parliament. We have 45 people in German state parliaments, we're in the Icelandic parliament, the Czech senate, and in many, many more places, and we've spread a number of countries across the world. So, as a result of this, a number of magazines have bestowed me personally with a number of rather prestigious awards. That's pretty humbling actually, because all I did was put up an ugly website. But let's take a look at today's entertainment then. Let's start with looking at the values. What is new here, and what is old? What's my personal journey, and then what do we learn from leadership? How can we apply this in changing the world? Also, there's going to be free books. The values that the pirate party tapped into are really about fundamental liberties, and they're most easily explained by the old letter. You know, when our parents communicated, they actually took out pen and paper, wrote something on the paper, folded it, put it in an envelope, put a stamp on the envelope, addressed the envelope, and put it in a mailbox. I actually did that when I was young. I'm starting to feel old now. So, that letter had certain characteristics to it. It was anonymous. You and you were lone determined whether you identified yourself, a sender on the outside of the envelope for the world to see, on the inside for only a recipient to know, or frankly not at all. It was secret and transit. Nobody would have their letters opened unless they were under formal and prior suspicion of a very serious crime. It was untracked. Nobody had the means nor the capability to see who was communicating with him. And last but not least, the mailman was obviously never responsible for the contents of the message. What we are saying is that it's absolutely reasonable for our children to inherit these rights in their communicative environment. And when you say this, some industries, in particular the copyright industry, go absolutely stratospheric and say, you can't seriously allow anybody to send anything to anybody else. We'd go out of business. We can't make any money. And I say, so what? We never determined our civil liberties based on who gets to make a profit or not. This is not rocket science. That if an invasion of privacy was not okay in the age of the letter, then it's not okay in the age of the net. These are the same civil liberties. These are the same concept. After all, an entrepreneur's role in society is to make money given the current constraints of society and technology. They do not get to dismantle civil liberties even if they can't make money otherwise. So that's our core value. And that really struck a chord in particular with the net generation growing up. Thank you for applauding, by the way. I appreciate it. So what about my personal journey here? I mean, just being a guy who put up a website finding himself in the middle of this value-driven movement from putting up an ugly web page to having people in parliaments and being in many, many countries. Well, I was quite frustrated with the way policy was being made in the information policy field. And I had this beautiful thing, though, I think we can recognize as the entrepreneur's insight. I can do this better. Policymakers weren't being evil. They just didn't know better. In my mind, they were underperforming. So I decided to try to do better. I posted a manifesto on a really ugly web page and announced it with two lines in a chat channel. That was all the advertising I ever did. It just detonated and there were 300 activists on the first day just figuratively holding out their palms to me like this, saying, give me something to do. I want to be a part of this movement. So I realized this was my chance to change the world for the better. At the time, I had a high-paying IT job. So I took out a huge loan, went to the bank and said, I have a project. I didn't really specify what. And quit my job in that order, very, very important, and decided to go for it. Now, as any entrepreneur can probably relate to, I eventually ran out of money. But at that point, the movement had gotten so large that I was actually able to live off of donations for 18 months. And that is a very, very humbling experience that people trust you so much with leading this change for the better, that they are funding your food and rent. Several hundred people giving a little, little every month to make me able to do this full-time. Or as the tabloids would have it, I was living off of begging. Well, I guess it's technically true, but it's their way of wording it, isn't it? Then came the European elections of 2009, three and a half years after founding. Now, this is a long, long time in internet time, but in politics, it's really a blink of an eye. It's Greece lightning when we became the largest party for people under 30, as I said, on less than 1% of the other's budget. We just drop kicked them. I loved that. That was the night of my life, that election victory dinner. And that was followed by success all over Europe, replicating this recipe. And we've now been described as the fastest growing political movement, which is kind of humbling us again. So let's see what we learned from this. In terms of leadership, people want to be part of change. People want to do something more than just collect their paycheck. Well, most people anyway. I sometimes taught executives saying that, you know, your most valuable asset isn't your employees. Your most valuable asset is the thousands of people who want to work for you for free and you don't let them. After that, I usually have their ears. So the swarm organization is tens of thousands of volunteers that gather and focus around a common cause. It can be explained a bit by a Futurama quote. There's this quote saying, when push comes to shove, you got to do what you love. Even if it's not a good idea. I mean, after all, what kind of idiot thinks they can change the world by founding a new political party? If it's stupid, but works, it ain't stupid, right? So you need to rally people to your goal. You need to announce a goal that just puts a flag in the ground. And remember, you don't need a lot of advertising. I just posted two lines in a chat channel and a snowball from there. But this goal has certain requirements to it. It needs to fulfill four criteria. And this is where that little asterisk comes back. And when you do, you can see that swarm intelligence emerges. Those four criteria are that the goal must be tangible, credible, inclusive and epic. Let's take a look at all of them. They're tangible. You need to be laser focused on the change you want to accomplish in the world. In this case, have specific civil liberties that carried over from the analog world into the digital world. You might want to ban landmines. You might want to take humanity to Mars. You might want to do something that's very specific. What you might want to do is say, you know, we should all like feel good man. Not going to work. It needs to be credible. While you need to really go out there and make a worthwhile change, at the same time, you need to present a project plan that's so credible that people can see that the plan takes you from A to B. You need to break it down into sub-goals that people can see. Some of them are executable. And the sub-goals, as some of them, really takes you to the goal. And here's where the more interesting swarm mechanisms comes in, as it needs to be inclusive. Anybody seeing this project plan needs to immediately see there's a spot for me. That's what I want to do in this project. You need to be able to just jump in and start doing that without asking anybody. And I'll get back to that. It needs to be inclusive. And last but not least, it needs to be epic. Shoot for the moon. Go really bribe and bold. On second thought, don't shoot for the moon. You know why? We've already been there. Shoot for Mars. That's epic. So once you have these four goals, it's a natural reaction to feel that, what have I really taken on here? Can I do this? But you know what? There's no reason to fear huge obstacles. What you should fear is the dark. If you know how high that mountain is, then you know exactly what it takes to climb it. If you know how far away Mars is, and we do, then we know exactly what it takes to get there. It's the unknown that are the obstacles, not the huge mountain. Anything we can plan like a project, we can execute like a project. So let's see, for instance, if we were building a volunteer organization to go to Mars, we need two dozen volunteer rocket scientists, one dozen volunteer metallurgists, some crazy person who will mix hypergolic rocket fuel in their backyard, and so on. Once you know the resources you need, then you can plan for getting them. And when you do this, the swarm intelligence emerges, as people can just jump in and start contributing to the goal. And let's take a closer look at how that organization is built, how you optimize for the swarm organization. There are three things you optimize for. They are speed, trust, and scalability. And this goes quite counter to what you learn at business school. Speed, first of all, remove decision bottlenecks. That specifically needs cut yourself out of the loop. We had something called a three-person rule in the fire party, the Swedish fire party, which meant that if three people were in agreement that something was good for the movement, they had green light from the highest office to just go ahead and do it, including spending resources. Normally when you present this kind of empowerment, as in business people talk of empowerment, but not to this extent, and they kind of look at you like, who let that guy out? But you know what? I led this party for five years through 50,000 people, and this was not abused once. Not one single time. It turns out that when you give people the keys to the castle, look them in the eyes and say, I trust you, they step up to the plate. They step up to the plate. At the same time, obviously, since we're pioneers, we need to expect mistakes. Trying the unknown means that in order to find the great recipe, you must allow new things to be tried. And therefore, practically by definition, some things will fail. And when they do, we learn from them and we move on. The biggest organizations with huge budgets make the most face-palming mistakes, too. Just to illustrate how catastrophic PRGAF's some big budget mistakes can do. One of my favorites is the Swedish healthcare landlord, Lokum. It's a Latin name, meaning location, and their logo looks just like this. They had kind of a bad rep in the Swedish society, so they decided to portray themselves as a warm and friendly company in a huge advertising campaign. So they replaced the low-case O in their logo with a big red heart and plastered their salt all over Swedish media. I'm not joking. You can look this up. Just search for Lokum Advertising and you'll find the campaign. So if a huge organization can make that kind of a face-palming mistake, it turns out that you can draw the conclusion that no matter how many safeguards you put in place, some mistakes will be made. And therefore, we can expect them and when they happen, we learn from them and we move on. This leads to another advantage, which is iteration speed. We may need to do something 10 or 15 times in order to master it. So minimize that iteration speed. Fail faster, fail better. Try again, fail again, fail better, fail again, fail better, fail faster. When we communicate that we trust each other, magic starts to happen. Which leads me to the next point, trust. Encourage diversity. Again, this goes counter to business school, which says that you must have a consistent branding across all segments. No, you don't. Because the most efficient branders, the most efficient marketers are people's friends. And you're not those people's friends. So you need them to translate your vision for you. Be crystal clear in what your vision is and let your colleagues, your volunteers translate it to their social contexts. Language is an extremely strong inclusion mechanism, an exclusion mechanism. So you need people in every social context to translate it. Because you don't know which social context is going to be key to success in advance. And this also means that you get a lot of different approaches tried in parallel at no extra cost to you. Plus, most importantly, we need to communicate that we need this diversity. Even if I have no idea what that person over there is doing, then we know that we trust each other to work for the good of the movement. And that person in that social context might do something that makes perfect sense there. So we come back to this golden rule of the net. If you see something you don't like, don't diss it. Instead, contribute with something you do like. And the third principle is scalability. Get feet on the ground, scale out there, build what looks like a hierarchical organization, but it's much more janitorial and managerial in nature. Allow people to take on small, small responsibilities. It might be something simple as keeping the box of flyers for a city. And when you build a hierarchical organization of maybe two, three, four percent of the activists total that support the rest, what happens is that these people make it possible for swarm intelligence to emerge around these resources. And when that swarm intelligence emerges, your reward will be a cost efficiency advantage of, in our case, two orders of magnitude. We're not talking shaving a couple of percent of the cost here. We are talking about running circles around the competition, which is exactly what we did, which is exactly what we have replicated in country after country after country. So do you want to change the world? Meaning is about the big picture, right? I'm betting that each and everybody in this room has a dream to change something for the better. Maybe you want to bring clean water to a billion people. Maybe you want to teach three billion people to read. Maybe you're into distribution of wealth and want to introduce an unconditional basic income, or as we spoke about earlier, maybe you want to take humanity to Mars. Or this is about leadership. And I'm willing to bet that whether you believe that you can or cannot change the world, odds are that you're absolutely right. Change, you know, doesn't just happen. It doesn't just happen. Somebody makes it happen. And the one key question I want everybody in this room to take with them from my presentation is, do you want to be that person? Do you want to be that person? One last thing, fun. Fun in this context is much more about just enjoying your day at work. It's actually a requirement for success, for a very, very simple reason. And that is that a movement like this needs volunteers. It needs volunteers in the tens of thousands, needs to attract volunteers. And this is when we come back to a very easily observable human trade. People like having fun. People gravitate to other people who are having fun. In contrast, they will take long, long detours around people who are not having fun. So if you want to change the world, you must make sure that you enjoy doing it. As a side bonus, you get to have fun while changing the world for the better. And that's not really a bad thing, is it? So in summary, we've been talking a bit about how you can build a new kind of organization that does things in rather complete opposite in many aspects from what you would learn at business school. So a recipe for a swarm organization. The goal. The goal needs to be tangible, credible, inclusive and epic. The organization needs to be optimized for three factors. Speed, trust and scalability. You need to have fun. And if you do this, then your reward in changing the world will be two orders of magnitude of cost efficiency. And I'm not making that up. We've had that to reiterate we had 50,000 euros in our campaign budget. Our competition had 6 million and we beat them. We were running circles around the competition. Finally, if you want to know more about this concept of a swarm organization, there is a book named Swarmwise there. And it's available here out in the bar. There's actually a whole box of them. Just grab one if you want to know more about what I've said here today. And on the odds that these books should run out, you can also download the PDF entirely for free at this address, falkingit.net slash books. The name is Swarmwise, one word, nine letters, Swarmwise. And it's very easy to find online. Thank you for today and I hope you enjoy the presentation.