Tiger Tiger

One of my last projects when I was at the RAND Corporation involved leading a small tiger team. We were charged with identifying innovative opportunities for helping Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Hurricanes Irma and Maria. There were a few other tiger teams, each with slightly different Strategic Objectives. We had fun, open, and smart brainstorming meetings. It was kind of what I dreamed of when I first imagined being a policy analyst. Well, minus the impact. I never heard much about the impact.

The idea was to get a small group of diversely trained but highly educated, relatively young people to study something that they had not been immersed in for years and years. Come up with creative ideas. Avoid historical baggage and groupthink. Report directly to senior people. Publish and publicize the results. All without spending a fortune.

The person putting together the team could hand pick the team, buy their loyalty, and have a level of control that they wouldn’t normally have. It makes for an enticing vision for some senior person in some large legacy organization.

The dinner party story I tell about the Puerto Rico tiger team effort is based on a rumor I heard at the time. Some new grad on some other tiger team wrote a piece proposing incentives for small-scale communal agriculture. An important Congressman read it and was incensed. We were proposing the Cultural Revolution. Nobody expects the Cultural Revolution! Cue lots of hand wringing and some intense meetings. There were other less interesting but also cringey rumors, ideas, and discussions. Proposed investments that thoughtful people thought or knew, for one reason or another, were impossible or would offer a terrible return on investment. Think proposing streetcars to a Traffic Engineer.

We did develop some ideas that impressed me at the time. One involved incentives for rooftop solar installations in remote communities based on a pretty convincing cost benefit analysis. Another involved advertising to support Puerto Rican agriculture in mainland communities with large Puerto Rican populations. It’s been awhile and I am sure I am getting the details wrong. But I think it’s safe to say our recommendations were a mixed bag.

I was nonetheless impressed by my colleagues work. I knew how challenging it was to say something meaningful and innovative without a wealth of knowledge or experience on the topic at hand.

At the time, I was also on one of many more typical RAND project teams also working in Puerto Rico. My more traditional team focused on transportation issues. That team was spending weeks at a time on the ground on the island. Ponce is lovely! Most people on most of the tiger teams never went to the island. The larger teams had studied the area and the topics they were focusing on for decades. They were naturally skeptical of the tiger team.

In my tiger team role, I tried to be humble and learn from the more established project teams and external experts. I did some data munging dirty work to support one of the established teams. I met with some FEMA staff. It wasn’t part of our tiger team charter. But it felt like the right thing to do. To a person we all had that attitude and it paid dividends. It tied different groups of people together and helped avoid consulting inception with sub-teams inside of teams inside of teams. The data munging work ended up being totally irrelevant to the tiger team outputs. Still worth it.

Droning On

At around the same time, I was also part of a small group of researchers studying commercial drone delivery and public policy. This was an internally funded RAND project designed to position the institution, and us personally, as thought leaders. Although we weren’t called a tiger team, the work felt similar to the Puerto Rico tiger team effort.

On the drone delivery effort, I came in with a decent amount of tangential but relevant knowledge. I had worked for years on aviation systems research within the government. I’d like to think that some of our most interesting findings were based on discussions I set up. Thanks PK! Others on the project were experts on aircraft design or other relevant topics but hadn’t worked on drove delivery specifically.

If I’m honest, I again felt a bit let down by our lack of impact. I don’t know what I was expecting. There actually was, and looks like continues to be, a decent amount of RAND support for drone related research. Maybe I just chose sub-topics that didn’t lead to clear and immediate impact. Or didn’t follow up.

I found the idea of internally funded projects fascinating. When I started at RAND, I loved the idea. I could propose something, anything and RAND would take my idea seriously. Someone very senior in the organization would read a one-pager I wrote and often discuss it with me. If the idea was good enough, I would get resources to study the thing and even to hire people to study the thing.

As time went on, I got discouraged by repeated failures. The failures felt worse the more time and thought I had put into the applications. It also felt like the wrong ideas and the wrong project teams were the ones being selected. I knew better, especially on anything regarding transportation or machine learning. Ah, youth / ambition.

At one point, I learned that there were many more rejected than accepted proposals. I don’t know if that made me feel better or worse. Was the whole program a waste of time? Was it for morale and if so was it doing more damage than good? At the time, I had the same questions about performance reviews, and the multitude of minor RAND prizes and programs that rewarded specific individuals. Feels different a few years older and removed from the situation.

I think more favorably of the internally funded research program now. It’s important for an organization like RAND to study certain topics even if a funding agency hasn’t put money behind them. It’s important for researchers to spend a few days a year thinking about what’s important without constraint. It’s important for the most senior staff to see and think deeply about the big ideas of other staff. Some of the project ideas I really believed in at the time seem dumb now. Thank goodness nobody gave me $1 million to study the hyperloop!

Conclusion

If I imagine myself as a manager at a large, old company (hmmm), I love the idea of setting up a tiger team. As an individual contributor, I like the idea of being on a tiger team. Research, especially relatively unconstrained research, is the fun part. If the team can have real impact, even better.

I don’t like the idea of not being selected to be on a tiger team or of seeing a tiger team come in and stamp on my turf. Humility on the tiger team is key. Which is awkward because leaders will naturally want to pick tiger team leaders with vision and drive. It can help if tiger team leaders and members do some support work on more established project efforts to start. Or the opposite I suppose, if the tiger team steers clear of any potential conflict areas with existing teams and works in their own swimlanes.

Domain knowledge is also key, ideally from somewhat of an outsider’s perspective. Some tiger team ideas will be brilliant. Many will not be. Imagine asking a talented but relatively new hire about how your organization works. I actually love hearing what they have to say, but also think a lot of what they say is nonsense. Have you worked with Gen Z?

Overall, tiger teams are probably a net positive. Especially if they really are cheap and really do focus on blue sky thinking. Thoughtful people should vet and, when appropriate, promote tiger team ideas. Leaders should engage with and empower those working in the relevant areas but not on the tiger teams to keep engagement high.