Alex Barker
Alex Barker is an author, business consultant, coach and learning designer. She leads Be More Pirate: a book turned global movement that supports people and organisations to challenge the status quo and be bolder and braver in their thinking. She has designed and delivered workshops and training programmes for global businesses such as Netflix, Salesforce, Vodafone and Google.
Her first book How to Be More Pirate, co-authored with social entrepreneur Sam Conniff, captures case studies from across the Be More Pirate network, and outlines a framework for change that helps people foster a more creative, risk tolerant mindset. Alex also hosts the Be More Pirate podcast, interviewing rebels, pioneers, and change makers across the world.
Alex is an expert in leadership, communications and culture change; in 2022 she co-designed and delivered a large-scale global training programme for Mercedes-Benz, up skilling their employees to become mentors to young environmental entrepreneurs. This was part of a bigger project looking at how you can apply social movement strategies to change corporate culture.
She is currently working on her next book “The Edges of the Map” which will look at the psychology of non-conformity through a series of real world experiments. Alex is also a strong advocate for up skilling women in the workplace and runs a public speaking programme, Pass the Mic, for women who want to find and own their voice.
Previously she worked at the Royal Society of Arts and holds degrees in Comparative Literature and International Relations from King’s College London. The fusion of storytelling and system change is the foundation of her work.
Topics
How to Be More Pirate
From Treasure Island to Pirates of the Caribbean, Blackbeard to Barbosa - pirates are usually portrayed as outlaws and villains. But what if you’re not getting the full story?
Far from being trouble makers, pirates were the entrepreneurs, innovators and pioneers of their day. They created democratic high-performing teams, distributed power, forged new alliances, and built fairer, better systems. They didn’t just break rules, they rewrote them entirely.
Based on the framework in her book How to Be More Pirate and seven years of coaching global teams, Alex Barker will show you how modern organisations have applied pirate principles to successfully reshape their business model, leadership style and culture.
Be More Pirate offers teams and leaders the tools to broach difficult conversations, take more strategic risks and navigate uncertainty. Backed by behavioural science, this talk will explore why rebellion, done in the right way at the right moment, isn't a risk to manage but a skill to harness.It will give you a completely different lens on change and the permission to start doing things differently.
The Edges of the Map
You can’t solve problems with the same mindset that created them. So why do we keep on trying?
After nearly a decade as a business consultant and facilitator, Alex has seen the same problems arise over and over as a result of teams using the same thinking, the same methods and the same approaches. The solution is not more information, the solution lies in our lived experience.
A natural extension of Be More Pirate, this talk dives deeper into the psychology of non-conformity. Through a series of real world experiments,Alex will explore how you can break with convention to unlearn unhealthy behaviours, disrupt ingrained patterns, reclaim your attention, compound your imagination, better trust your judgement, and embrace life’s grey areas.
The edges is where the future reveals itself, and the future belongs to those at the edges.
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