We’ve all heard or used the term Tiger Teams to describe a group focused on quickly solving a critical problem. But where did the name come from?
You have to wind the clock back to 1964 when a paper entitled Program Management in Design and Development described a Tiger Team as "a team of undomesticated and uninhibited technical specialists, selected for their experience, energy, and imagination, and assigned to track down relentlessly every possible source of failure in a spacecraft subsystem or simulation.”
Wow, they knew how to write a definition back then!
And one of those teams hit a home run when Gene Kranz and his Tiger Team won a Presidential Medal of Freedom for their key role in bringing Apollo 13 home. If you saw the movie, they were the guys with duct tape, cardboard, and gross coffee mugs.
Tiger Teams continue to solve crisis and near-crisis problems at NASA, DOE, and many other organizations.
So what’s wrong with Tiger Teams? As effective as they can be in the right circumstance, a few things really.
The first being they’re usually late to the party, working to fix a problem that wouldn’t have become critical if its roots were identified and addressed earlier. That work takes a different kind of team — one that looks beyond tech and tactics and into an organization’s communications gaps, flows, processes, and strategies.
The second is Tiger Teams can be disruptive. When formed and deployed they control the discussion and often the resources in their hunt for a solution. They can interrupt normal processes or projects with experimental changes. And Tiger Teams typically are moving too fast to communicate effectively as to why these changes are happening.
Third, they solve a problem and go away, often taking knowledge and insights gained with them. Sometimes they do publish a report, but getting one is usually like asking software developers to document their code.
And fourth, Tiger Teams don’t stay in place to institutionalize change and ongoing operational improvements. This echoes the first point in that Tiger Teams deal in crises, not continuity. And it’s darned hard to have Continuous Improvement without continuity.
All this said, be honored if you’re asked to lead or be part of a Tiger Team. There’s no time for anyone but the best. I’ve never been on one where I didn’t learn a lot in a short period of time while building valuable relationships. And at least once we saved the company.
Anyone have other points or a Tiger Team Tale they’d like to share?