Rich Blake

A place to reflect on how I'm learning to live with arthritis, my experience leading high performing teams and everything else in between.

Weeknote 4 – What I took from Saipan

26 January 2026

Hello hello,

I started writing this from the upstairs bar of the BEAM theatre in Hertford, wearing my new glasses (hooray), with half an hour to kill before Saipan started. I always aim to walk into the cinema at the last responsible moment, mainly to avoid every single advert.

I came out of the cinema, deleted everything, and started again.

I didn’t expect the film to stick with me as much as it did. I went in thinking I was watching a football comedy. I came out thinking about teams, leadership, and failure under pressure.

This weeknote is me trying to make sense of that. There’s also a facilitation idea at the end if you want to watch it with your own team and use it as a learning moment.

There are no spoilers. Can you spoil a film about a historical event? Maybe?

The five dysfunctions of a Roy Keane team

Saipan is a comedy of errors about the Irish football team’s training camp before the 2002 World Cup. Almost everything that can go wrong does go wrong: missing footballs, poor food, too much alcohol, unsafe training conditions, and rising tension between the team captain and the manager.

The story starts with a team placed in an environment that doesn’t set them up for success. Problems are visible early on, but a lack of accountability means they aren’t addressed until it’s far too late. It ends with Roy Keane, the team’s captain, leaving the squad after losing trust in almost everything around him.

As with many dysfunctional teams, there are no heroes here — even when people believe they are acting heroically.

In a lean coffee community session that I facilitated earlier in the week, we talked about Patrick Lencioni’s Five Dysfunctions of a Team, so it was on my mind. If you’re not familiar with it, the book describes five patterns that often show up together:

  • absence of trust
  • fear of conflict
  • lack of commitment
  • avoidance of accountability
  • inattention to results

The model is cumulative. It starts with trust. Without trust, healthy conflict is hard. Without conflict, commitment is weak. Without accountability, results suffer.

Absence of trust

Trust is the foundation of any team. If people don’t feel safe being honest or vulnerable, issues stay hidden. When they are raised, they can often feel like personal attacks.

In Saipan, Roy clearly cares about standards and performance. He comes from a high-performing background and expects it here. At the same time, management doesn’t trust his intent. That lack of trust leads to some deeply uncomfortable and explosive moments.

When I was introduced to delivery management, someone described the role to me as holding up a mirror to a team. You can’t just say a space is safe. You have to actively create the conditions for safety.

Fear of conflict

When that safety exists, conflict is healthy. It’s also necessary for an agile way of working.

If you can’t go into a user research session, see a major problem, and talk about it openly, you’re likely to deliver software that simply doesn’t work for your users.

In Saipan, Roy often feels he has to speak up because no one else can. When concerns aren’t heard or taken seriously, problems escalate and people get injured. Much of this was avoidable.

Your facilitation is about making sure all voices are heard early, and helping teams respond to change before it’s too late. (And just as importantly, you help others build those facilitation skills too).

Lack of commitment

Teams need a shared sense of purpose. Roles should be clear. Everyone should agree on what good looks like. Without that clarity, it’s hard to move forward together.

In one scene, the team sees the training pitch they’ve been given: rocky ground, sharp stones, and no footballs. Nearby, management are relaxed, wearing flower garlands and drinking champagne. There’s no real commitment to improving the team’s situation, and it leads directly to an injured player.

Part of delivery management is helping teams agree what good looks like and creating the conditions for success: whether that’s the environment, the tools, or how effort is aligned with the goals of the team.

Avoidance of accountability

Avoidance of accountability is when no one feels able to challenge missed commitments or falling standards. Often, this leaves one person forced into the role of “voice of reason”.

That’s exactly what happens in Saipan. Roy becomes an enforcer of standards, and management sees this as undermining authority rather than something helpful. In a tense exchange, Roy points out that the manager accepts things are bad, but never asks how they themselves could improve.

Your role is to help teams make clear commitments and reflect on them with kindness when things don’t go to plan. It’s also about making sure that the conditions are right for the team to work hard under pressure when it matters most, such as during an incident.

Inattention to results

Inattention to results shows up when teams drift away from shared outcomes. Ego creeps in. Winning arguments matters more than making good decisions. Progress slows or stops entirely. You often start to see people who care about pace and momentum becoming increasingly frustrated.

In Saipan, the camp prioritises enjoying the sunshine over preparing for the World Cup. That lack of focus is quietly accepted by almost everyone.

Agile teams counter this through fast feedback loops and visible work. When those loops work, progress is motivating and clear, and you find out what’s not working fast through good automated testing and from your users. Your role is to help keep those loops healthy.

How management thinking has changed

Writing this also made me think about Ted Lasso. It’s another football story, but it reflects very different assumptions about motivation and leadership.

Where Saipan reflects a more traditional, command-and-control style of management, Ted Lasso shows a more modern approach. Trust, openness, and healthy debate sit alongside hard work and results.

Even allowing for the fact that Ted Lasso is fictional, it’s striking how much coaching and management thinking has changed in just twenty years. From older, Taylor-style models focused on control and correction, to more modern approaches that focus on purpose, autonomy, and mastery.

I’m left feeling very lucky to have the role that I do, helping teams be at their best and I’m glad that agile working is such a radically different way of working than those old ‘scientific management’ style methods. It’s made me think about the principles of the Agile Manifesto and how good they are.

How I might use this with a team

I’m interested to see if anyone in my team wants to watch it together. It would be optional, outside of work hours, and not funded by work.

Moments like this, where popular culture mirrors real team dynamics, can create powerful learning opportunities.

TRIZ is a Liberating Structure that helps surface uncomfortable truths safely by starting with fictional worst-case scenarios. I’ve modified it slightly to work as a short ‘book club’ type conversation. I’d use it like this:

Objective:
“How do we set the conditions to win our own World Cup and avoid a Saipan-style crash-out?”

Reflect:
Introduce the five dysfunctions with short definitions. Use 1-2-4-All to list behaviours seen in the film to them.

Interpret:
Use 1-2-4-All to identify any behaviours, however small, that resemble in ourselves in our list of what was seen in the film.

Decisional:
Identify actions that would help prevent those behaviours, then agree priorities and ownership.

Let’s see what it might reveal.

What I’ve been into

Outside of this:

  • I published an article on Liberating Structures
  • I’ve been building a prototype OKR Slack bot
  • I shared some process guides at a team show-and-tell
  • I started writing a guide on automating roadmap publishing
  • I’ve been walking more after work and recently beat my distance record since getting sick - healing one step at a time 🤞

What? So what? Now what

What?

  • Saipan highlights common patterns of team failure
  • TRIZ works by starting with a fictional worst-case

So what?

  • These patterns are hard to talk about directly
  • TRIZ helps surface them without blame

Now what?

  • I’ll recommend the film to my team
  • If people are keen, then I’ll try the facilitation approach above

That’s it for this week. Bye!