The Tao of Ted Lasso: Life, Leadership and the Art of Getting Along (Part 4)

Part 4: The Tao, Ted Lasso and Curiosity

I'm going to digress for a moment and touch on religion because this series is not about religion. It’s about effective leadership from a humanistic perspective demonstrated in a popular fictional TV show based on core principles that were being taught more than 2,600 years ago.

The thesis, if you want to call it that, is that people fundamentally are all the same and that we really haven't changed much in all that time so that what was being taught then remains relevant now.

My sister lives in rural northern California, about 100 miles northwest of Reno, and is the closest thing to a living saint that I know. She and her husband, a Christian minister, are people of faith.

When Hurricane Katrina devastated the New Orleans area she and her husband packed up their lives and went there to help with the relief efforts. They stayed for five months, part of a group sustaining 6,000 people made homeless by the hurricane, until they could do no more and then returned home where they picked up where they left off.?

People of faith, across various religions, talk-the-talk in places of worship and on TV.?My sister and her husband walk-the-walk among the filth and muck. I say this with no small degree of pride.?

She began reading my essay 'The Tao of Ted Lasso' when she learned I was writing about the topic. "Doesn’t Ted Lasso promote Taoism?" her husband asked me warily over dinner one evening.

Not at all, I responded. It’s a broadcast comedy. Pure entertainment. Nothing religious about it. The Tao insight hit me after reading numerous articles about the show having a self-improvement angle and seeing the polarization happening in our country.

Having lived in Sri Lanka during the civil war, and having the Vietnam War and the Lebanon Civil War burned into my psyche, I witnessed first-hand the result of polarization, intolerance and the fragility of democracy.

Human beings belong to the species Homo Sapiens. We’re made of the same stuff and built almost identically the same - 99.9% in terms of DNA. We want the same things: happiness, to be loved, lack of want, safety for our loved ones, a home.

How is it that we are capable of inflicting such horrendous violence on each other? It led me to think back to this 2,600 year old philosophy for getting along that I was exposed to so long ago.

‘But isn’t Taoism a religion?' my born-again sister added with a raised eyebrow. No and yes I responded after some reflection. It’s a set of behaviors and practices that have been around for a long time, many of which are relevant for good leadership today which is how I am looking at it. But I suppose it could also be seen as a belief system if one considers some of the underlying assumptions, such as believing in the interconnectedness of everything.

In truth, and in typical human fashion, Lao Tzu was deified by his followers following his death and Taoism became a type of religion. Which is ironic because Lao Tzu himself would not have approved. His objective was simply to compile a set of practices that helped people to get along.

I’m not a religious scholar. I’m just curious about the human condition and why things are the way they are.?Many of the religions that I have been exposed to also advocate interconnectedness (e.g., love thy brother, reincarnation, ancestry worship, indigenous people’s beliefs, etc.).

By that standard science and physics could also be seen as a belief system as they build on theories (e.g., the theory of relativity, dark matter & dark energy which can't be seen or directly measured) and argue that everything we know is made of the same stuff, ‘star stuff’ in the worlds of the late Carl Sagan, and therefore is interconnected.

To be clear I am not advocating Taoism, religion, or Taoism as a religion. I just find it interesting that a 2,600 year old philosophy for getting along that predates Christianity remains relevant in our modern world. And the reason it does is because, at least from the standpoint of our brains, we all are still essentially the same. What worked back then still works now.

Now back to our regular programming on leadership principles found in the Apple TV comedy series Ted Lasso that are found in the Tao.?

As important as humility is in leadership and as a life practice, curiosity is arguably the single most important trait anyone can possess. It can positively impact every aspect of life and especially interpersonal relationships.?But it follows humility because humility provides a foundation for curiosity, making it easy to be curious.?

What’s admirable about the character Ted Lasso is his ability to check his ego and be inquisitive to the point of exposing his own weaknesses. In the context of the Tao, weakness requires strength therefore if one lacks strength it's only because they haven’t found it. It is the equivalent of dark matter and dark energy.?We know it's there but just can’t see it.

Early in Season 1 Ted shares a story about the importance of curiosity. “Guys underestimated me my entire life. And for years, I never understood why. It used to really bother me. But then, one day, I was driving my little boy to school, and I saw this quote by Walt Whitman, and it was painted on the wall there. It said: ‘Be curious, not judgmental.’ And I liked that. So I get back in my car, and I’m driving to work, and all of a sudden, it hits me. All them fellas that used to belittle me; not a single one of them were curious. They thought they had everything all figured out. So they judged everything and everyone. And I realized that their underestimating me…who I was had nothing to do with it. Cause if they were curious, they could’ve asked questions.”

There are two important aspects to the point Ted is making about curiosity. The first is that there is value to investment in the understanding of others.?

The Zhou Dynasty Chinese General Sun Tzu, sometime between 475 and 221 B.C.E. during the Warring States period, said something similar about curiosity in his The Art of War more than 200 years after the Tao is believed to have been written. “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”

Making judgments about people is easy. Making assumptions is easy. Neither requires effort or time. We’re all pre-programmed to respond to certain stimuli by nature, evolution and experience. We don’t need to think long about the snake in front of us to know we should avoid it irrespective of whether it is poisonous.?Not so much a bunny.?

Questioning what we believe we know requires investment (i.e., effort), in the parlance of evolutionary psychologists, to overcome our pre-programmed responses. Digging for information, processing, and validation requires effort and?time. For this reason curiosity is in short supply in today’s time-strapped, polarized, me-first, look-at-me society.

Now as an exercise think back to the last time you met someone for the first time. How curious were they of you? How curious were you of them? How’d you do?

Obviously it is impossible to treat every stimulus as if it were new.?One could not function that way. One just needs to be aware of their own triggers and biases, which requires no small degree of humility, and to focus on those.

The importance of curiosity to Ted’s character is reflected in the number of times it's demonstrated in the show albeit sometimes subtly. The most obvious example is early in the series when Ted meets and makes the effort to get to know Nate Shelley, the locker room attendant who is derided, dismissed and disrespected by nearly everyone.

Head Coach Ted Lasso (left) and Locker Room Attendant Nate Shelley (right) Photo by Apple TV

Ted sees Nate’s hard-to-miss lack of self-confidence but Ted’s curiosity leads him to engage with Nate. It is from that engagement he discovers Nate’s expert knowledge of the game.

Finding talent is a key requirement of leaders and not everyone does it well or with consistency.?It's no surprise that Nate’s value was overlooked by the prior, replaced coaching staff. Ted's curiosity uncovers this resource, hidden in plain sight, which complements his own expertise shortfall and contributes significantly to the competitiveness of the team.?

It would be understandable to assume that a locker room attendant has little to offer, if only because of the way others treat him. But it also would have been a waste of talent and a lost opportunity.?

It is worth noting that Ted doesn’t expect curiosity from others, yet that doesn't prevent him from being curious. It’s who he is. It is why he is successful as a coach. It is the role of a leader to ask “why?” And in the real world today that trait is becoming more important for general managers as knowledge workers become more and more specialized.

The second aspect to Ted’s point about curiosity is its necessity for innovation. Ted’s discovery of this expert resource hiding as a locker room attendant represents an innovation; the re-purposing of an asset to extract significantly greater value. Like using that smelly, sticky back stuff in the ground as fuel.

Bill James was working at a Kansas cannery when he came up with an idea that would transform baseball. The statistical data on players already existed, but his innovation that came to be known as Sabermetrics changed the game forever. He realized that there was a discontinuity in baseball between perceived player value and data supported actual value creating an arbitrage opportunity. This innovation became the basis for the movie Moneyball and was credited with ending the Boston Red Sox’s 86-year championship drought.?

Asking for the why of anything forces a rethinking of it. Why are things the way they are? Is it because of habit? Is it because of a problem that once existed? What was the problem? What is the problem we are now trying to solve??

As business leaders our function is to solve problems and curiosity is key to the formulation of possible innovative solutions. This was a lesson taught to me early in my career, as a shiny new-hire MBA?invited to meet with the board of directors for a publicly traded defense electronics firm following the annual shareholders meeting. The leadership had seen the fall of the Berlin Wall, anticipated that their pond was going to shrink, and had begun to explore ways of commercializing the Company's defense electronics technology IP. But commercial markets are a very different world and I had been hired to find a way of cracking that nut.

One of the more elderly board members asked me how I was finding the new job. I cautiously responded with a long list of the challenges we were facing. He smiled, wagged a finger at me for emphasis and coached me “Business is the process of solving problems. If we didn’t have problems I wouldn’t need you.”

That brief interaction has stayed with me over the decades and altered my perception of my value-add. It remains one of the most valuable real-world lessons I have ever learned.

To paraphrase The Most Interesting Man in the World 'stay curious my friends.'

Previous: Part 3 Humility Next Time: Part 5 Detachment