The Counterweight
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?
Spoilers for the first three seasons of Ted Lasso. If you haven't watched yet, what are you even doing here?
Way back in the pilot, before anybody in Richmond knows what they've signed up for, we get this scene: Ted Lasso and Coach Beard get off a plane in London to run a football club neither of them understands. Ted is talking to everyone. Beard has his nose in a book, and is jotting down notes.
That's a decent picture of their roles, and it sticks for the three year arc.
I promised this post a while back, when I wrote about the two ways leaders fail. Ted burns out because he improvises everything. West Ham shatters because it planned everything. And the guy standing next to Ted the entire time is built the opposite way. Beard plans training weeks ahead. He worries about the thing that comes after the next thing. He knows the history of formations Ted thinks he’s dreamed up. Literally, in one case. Ted hallucinates, seeing triangles everywhere, and decides to try to bring triangles into his team’s strategy. It’s Beard who knows it already has a name, Total Football, and it was invented by the Dutch 50 years ago. (It’s relevant because this happens in Amsterdam.)
Here's what I think Ted did that most leaders don't.
He hired his opposite, somewhat on purpose. Seems like an obvious thing to do, but not many of us do it. I think most of us hire the person who makes us feel competent. They agree, move fast, and leave our blind spot exactly as it was - unwatched. Ted did the harder thing and put the counterweight in the room before there was any load to carry. Beard was there on day one, not brought in after a team crisis to bring stability.
The relationship does well on the field. Beard's preparation catches what Ted's instinct skips. Ted's instinct hands Beard raw material no plan could predict. When they argue, the team gets a better result than either of them could reach on their own.
And then, in season two, Ted ends up on the floor of his office with his heart pounding out of his chest, and Beard can’t fix it.
That's the part I can't let go of.
Beard’s counterweight was pretty much limited to tactics. He could overrule a formation. He couldn't touch Ted's belief that his job was to handle everything. That was something that hadn’t been assigned to anyone, so none of his coaches did it, and others that might’ve wanted to were prevented from doing it.
I went looking for research about this kind of situation and found Irving Janis, who spent the early seventies trying to explain how teams filled with talented and dedicated people talk themselves into disasters. The Bay of Pigs, being one. Instead of going the traditional route and hiring smarter/better team members, Janis wanted someone whose primary responsibility was to object. He saw that voluntary disagreement tends to collapse when there’s pressure to move forward. Airlines dealt with this issue - and they fixed it. After a string of crashes in the 70s where junior officers saw a problem and kept their mouths shut out of respect or deference, the industry overhauled training so that challenging the captain’s assumptions is in the first officer's job description. Staying silent became bad behavior.
It’s not that hard to find your opposite. Telling that person the things they’re supposed to stop you from doing is, though. Writing down that list means admitting that there’s a chance we’re wrong. Which, I think, is why we generally don’t go through the painful process of doing it. We find our counterweights, and then we don’t give them permission to sit opposite us on the seesaw. We’ll listen to their opinions, but nothing they do can move us until they’re on the same bar that we are.
Worth mentioning that Beard has the same issue in his personal life. He's in a relationship with a woman (Jane) that his friends keep telling him is bad for him, but nobody's allowed to intervene. The show never does much more than play it for laughs, right up to the wedding, which we learn has failed (perhaps temporarily) early in season 4. Beard’s failure is the same as Ted’s, just from the other side.
Okay. Time to drag this back to organizations.
The org chart version: The tactical operator brought in to balance the visionary. The chief of staff who's supposed to be the adult in the room. Ask them what they're allowed to prevent and see how long they stammer. Because that’s not how their jobs are defined. They give advice, not vetoes.
The biggest achievements I’ve had in business have come about because I listened to someone who had the courage to disagree. In fact, as a result, the creative process I’ve developed over decades starts with everyone in the room volunteering the worst ideas we can think of, and all of us pile on. We compete to create the most awful, and practice finding and sharing the fatal flaws in a situation where - if we were to approve the work - we’d be laughed out of the industry. I’ve found that practicing it... being in that mindset where we’re being counted on to find the flaws... makes it easier for advisors to stand up with a meaningful veto, and easier for leaders to recognize and accept the correction when they do. Which is why I'd start trying to learn how to do this somewhere nonthreatening.
Next time your team has a meaningful decision to make, try spending the first ten minutes the way my teams do. Everybody pitches the worst possible answer. Everybody else takes turns finding the flaws that would end it. And repeat the process for other consequential choices. You’ll find that the people who never disagree with you in meetings have way more insights than you’ve seen. They just needed a space where being ornery was the assignment. (You'll also notice it's fun, which is why it always comes back.)
Then there’s the part that’s less fun. Write down those topics or choices you expect them to have veto power over and hand them the list. If you can't think of any, what you've got is an advisor, and that's fine as long as you call it that. But I’d ask that you go further. Ask, “what have you already tried to stop me from doing, and failed?” Their answer tells you the situations where you’ve prevented them from getting on your seesaw when you needed it the most.
Going back to the stuff I know well - Ted built a counterweight for decisions and never built one for himself. Richmond had a way to catch a bad formation and no way to catch a coach carrying too much. Beard was on the seesaw, but only at the tactics end. When Ted's emotional weight came down on the other end, nobody was sitting there. I think the show is deliberate about that. Ted's collapse gets no dramatic trigger. No single loss, no scandal. The load arrived at a time and location where no one was in the other seat.
A seesaw only works if the other person is allowed to sit and push. An advisor who can't veto anything is sitting on the fulcrum, unable to help.
Have you given your counterweight permission to stop you? And when's the last time they actually did it?
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.
