Journeyman and Showman
What happens to an organization the moment its strongest personality walks out the door? This series, Lessons From a Fictional Football Club, turns to Ted Lasso as an unlikely case study, treating it as a structural experiment in what actually holds an organization together under pressure, versus what was just one person's charisma wearing a disguise. Across this series, I will pull leadership lessons from specific scenes, ground them in research where it exists, and close with structural reads through the Loadmap framework, all in service of one question worth asking about your own team: when you leave the room, what keeps running?
Late in season three, as a bunch of long-running stories begin to work towards resolution, we get this scene: Amsterdam, late at night, and grumpy old Roy Kent is forced to admit something in front of his arrogant protege, Jamie Tartt. Roy never learned to ride a bike. His granddad was going to teach him and died before he got the chance, and Roy just... went on with his life, and never learned.
They’re doing late night training, and Roy is pissed, as always. But Tartt pushes through the grumpiness and tries to teach him. Right there in the street. Roy wobbles, gets going, and then crashes. A lot. Until, eventually, he doesn’t.
Rewind a few weeks. Roy is banging on Jamie's door at four in the morning. Zava has just arrived at Richmond, Jamie is rattled, and Roy has decided to make him better than the new guy. Jamie groans about the time but drags himself out the door. But by the end of the episode he's ready before Roy is.
I pointed out these two characters at the end of the Greatest Hit post. Journeyman and Showman. Here's what I think is going on.
Roy built a career out of trying hard, because that was the thing he knew. He knows that being good at football takes dedication, practice, and intense effort. But, at least as an adult, Jamie never needed that. Things fell in Jamie’s lap. The ball did what he wanted it to do almost effortlessly. What he couldn’t do was dedicate himself. There wasn’t a ‘try harder’ setting for him to hit because he didn’t see the need for it.
That, I think, is why Roy drums effort and dedication into the kid for weeks. And then in Amsterdam, Jamie teaches him how to ride a bike. Something I’d argue can’t be learned by trying harder. The more you rigidly grip the handlebars the more often you’re going to crash. You have to accept that, in order to stay upright, sometimes you just gotta let the bike go where it wants to go and allow yourself to go along for the ride.
Here's the part I keep chewing on...
All of us have talent. Most of it tends to age out - particularly the physical stuff - and that stuff isn’t the sort of thing you can cut out of your identity and hand to someone else. It requires communication to move it from ourselves to the next person who needs to fill the role. When Roy aged out of playing football, the only thing that he could take with him was the stuff he could explain.
I went looking for quotes to see if anyone had shared something pithy. Michael Polanyi fit the bill nicely. “We know more than we can tell.”
I’ve found that in most organizations, people generally don’t refuse to share what they know. The issue is that the stuff that they know is stuff they’ve never had to explain to anyone, so it’s only in their heads and hands. Two things that tend to leave the organization when the people who own them do. Unshared skills don’t provide much value after the people who used them leave.
But here in Amsterdam we’ve got both Roy and Jamie actively sharing. It took two full seasons of Roy cussing out Jamie every time they crossed paths. Roy was contemptuous of Jamie’s unearned achievements. Jamie saw Roy as a scared man trying to hang on to talent that was already slipping. Both saw themselves as having nothing to offer the other, and saw nothing in the other that they wanted for themselves. Any knowledge transfer was stopped cold.
After the training and the night in Amsterdam, things genuinely shift. When Roy and Keeley break up, Jamie hears about it and goes to check on Roy. Offers him a hug. This is the same Jamie who spent two seasons trying to steal Keeley away. No one told him to make the gesture. Roy taught him a way of being - of trying - and trying changed what he wanted.
Not much visible organizational wisdom here yet, but I’ll try to dig it up now.
I think most of us instinctively pair people by what’s similar. The new hire goes to whoever's most like them, because it’s comfortable and nobody complains about it. Comfortable handoffs transfer attitude and style. The stretch pairing is the one that transfers capability, but it takes sustained effort and attention to keep it together, making it a choice most of us avoid. It’s hard to go back to the thing causing personality clashes and complaints when you know that taking the easy out is an option.
More... Your most valuable employees have knowledge that they’ve never shared with anyone because no one has ever asked for it. And all of it leaves whenever they do.
I’ve seen retailers and manufacturers whose entire training program was scrapped in favor of having new hires stand next to whoever’s available and watch them as they do the work. They do it because it’s easy and it gets people doing the work in minutes. But it strips away all the knowledge and understanding that has led the trainer to do the job in the way that they do. (And in both cases each trainer did things their own way, so not only did they not share wisdom, they gave conflicting instructions that led to weeks of errors, delays and corrections.)
If any of this sounds familiar, there are things you can do to make it better. Sure, you can formalize the training program and get people talking about why they do what they do rather than just demonstrating. But to understand how to fix this more broadly, consider trying this exercise. Find a person at your organization who clearly is adding a lot of value, but whose value is hard to explain. Instead of letting them go about business as usual, ask them to teach one particular complex thing to someone unlike them. (Helping them figure out who that might be is optional.) It needs to be small enough that it can be well taught in a month or less - and it needs to be taught with words, not by shadowing or watching. If they can't explain it, you've learned that a thing that you value is going to vanish the moment that person leaves - and you’ve learned it before they’re gone. It gives you a chance to work with them to unlock the words they’re missing.
Going back to the stuff I myself know well - I see that Richmond had wisdom in Roy that didn’t exist anywhere else. Roy himself couldn’t explain what it was that he knew. That arrangement held for years and nobody objected, because Roy kept on playing. Right up until he couldn’t. Roy knew his knee was giving out, and when it did, he quit. And he (briefly) took everything he knew with him. Most of the time organizations have little if any warning - one day the expert is at their desk, the next they’re providing value to the organization that hired them away.
Organizations that can’t identify the people who know stuff that no one has asked them to explain, or can’t help those people learn how to communicate what they know, are ceding control of their organizational knowledge and institutional memory to whatever the next hire brings with them.
Who on your team knows something nobody's ever asked them to explain? And how soon will you remedy that?
Lessons from a Fictional Football Club is a series of unofficial analysis and commentary. It is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by Apple, Warner Bros., or anyone connected with the television series Ted Lasso. Loadmap is the framework I think with in these posts. Loadmap, by Tate Linden, is offered exclusively by Stokefire.
