Most of you might have heard about the tremendous success the Pirate Party is currently having in Germany. Although they confess they don’t have a plan for every scenario, a solution for every problem and ties for talkshows. I think it’s not although, it’s because.
In an interesting article I read about ideas what our European leaders could learn from the Pirates. Basically it says that a lot of questions we currently have can’t be answered and it might be better to embrace the unknown than trying to find the final solution again and again (you get the contradiction). Indeed. The big questions of our time – how proceed with capitalism, climate change, the Euro crisis, the internet disrupting everything, the exploding world population – who can seriously give a final answer to what is permanently changing and has become so complex? Nobody can. But specifically politicians seem to be under the obligation to know an answer for everything. Absurd isn’t it?
The complex and the new need very different and open approaches which reminds me a lot of agile software development. Yesterday my great colleague @squil posted this cartoon explaining the traditional Waterfall way of developing software:
CC / http://geekandpoke.typepad.com
Hard to map the unknown right? So this is why we believe in agile which is I believe not only a state of the art way to handle software but to understand and handle the world we’re living in. Just look at the four principles of the agile manifesto:
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan
Compare it to how the financial crisis is managed in Europe. It’s exactly the opposite: sticking to contract negotiation, following a plan, death by documentation and bureaucratic processes. The classic static old fashioned traditional politics while the Pirate Party embraces openness rethinking methodology by experimenting e.g. with liquid feedback and grassroot democracy meeting the state of the art bottom-up route which was the way to success for many companies. I think this is what the Pirates understand so much better than everybody else and what they brought from their digital heritage. You can surely discuss and question their program but the fascinating part is not what they are doing, it’s the way they are doing it. Agile, open, bottom-up. And maybe this approach could solve the problems of Greece, Europe and the world at the end. Or better: be the way to to find a solution.
