What Ted Lasso teaches me about organisations

Last week I spoke about how rigid organisational structures was one of the main aspects hindering agility in organisations. I also spoke about the two reasons for that; one at an organisational level: not being able to deal with ambiguity and another at an individual level: the sense of identity we give our “job titles”.

This week I will expand on the first one: The Inability to deal with ambiguity at the organisational level
 
Last week I spoke about rigid structures, regardless if they are functional (old school) or cross functional (new school), it cause the same issues at the end of the day.They both set something in concrete, and we expect that it is going to be the silver bullet to make our organisation super effective, and the work flow beautifully without friction. Just to realise a few months later it is not quite like that, and we need to do another restructure and put everyone and everything on hold until that is done.
 
Last week I spoke about how the alternative was to have a “continuous fluid structures” and when I was thinking about how to explain this, I remembered an episode from Ted Lasso, season 2.
 
In this episode, while in Amsterdam, Ted dreams of a new dynamic system / structure for his soccer team in which any player can take over the role of any other player in the team. Now he didn’t know that; but that system was created by the Dutch National Team in the 1970’s and was based on four main tenets: conditioning, versatility, awareness, and belief.
 
I feel those four tenets can also apply to organisational design.

1.Conditioning

Conditioning would refer to the capabilities and capacity each member of the organisation brings, in other words their skills and experience.

2. Versatility

Versatility is the ability to perform different roles; we call that being “T-shaped” in today’s world of work. Which means having a deep expertise (the vertical line of the T) and being able to collaborate and perform other roles (the horizontal line of the T). For example, I can be an expert in Marketing but can also provide support and collaborate, even perform tasks for the product or tech areas.

3. Awareness

Awareness is understanding what the other parts / teams of the organisation are doing; not just me, my team or my function. You achieve this through individual willingness and  creating the right rituals, rhythms and visibility in the organisation about what work is done where and by whom.

4. Belief

And finally I believe this approach will only work if everyone in the organisation is actively working on growing vertically (how we see the world) and aiming to achieve unwavering self-belief; versus letting the ego get in the way of organisational success.
More on this next week.
 
So, how do you bring this to life you may ask? I can explain how we think about this at Neu21, and you can extrapolate it to your team or organisation.
 
At Neu21 we don’t have job titles or job descriptions. We all come with some expertise (conditioning) – for example mine would be agility and organisational design; others have innovation or change or leadership, etc.
 
Then when a client comes in, we discuss which people would be the most appropriate to deliver that work; this may be based on capacity and expertise. Usually, we put a team together with some “experts” and some people who wants to learn that area (versatility) and by shadowing those experts they start adding those skills to their repertoire.
 
At the same time, on top of the client work, we work on the business. Every 90 days we decide what initiatives need to be done in marketing, product, growth, people, etc to bring our organisation to the next level. The number of initiatives would be dependent on the capacity and amount of client work. We then bring teams together to deliver on those initiatives and create rhythms and visual management tools, so we all know what the others are doing (awareness).
 
And finally, we all actively work individually and as a group on our vertical development through different processes and structures (belief).
 
The result?
 
A thriving organisation that has remained profitable, sustainable and purpose-driven for the past 4 years in the midst of record inflation and a once in a life-time global pandemic.