Policymaking for Equity and Inclusion: Benefits of a “Tiger Team” approach
- elizabethmmorrow
- Oct 8
- 5 min read
In this post Dr Elizabeth Morrow provides a overview of how “Tiger Teams” offer governments and policymakers a structured, cross-functional approach to rapidly generate evidence-based, inclusive, equitable and actionable policy solutions. This approach is becoming more important due to increasingly complex and urgent policy challenge contexts. The post delves into the origins of Tiger Teams, how to operationalise the approach for success, and recent use case examples.
Why are Tiger Teams so useful?
The policy environment governments operate in today is characterised by urgency, interdependence, and complexity. Traditional mechanisms of inquiry, such as standing committees, interdepartmental working groups, and formal reviews, often struggle to deliver timely solutions that address multifaceted challenges involving diverse communities and needs. Increasingly, governments are turning to the Tiger Team model as a means of achieving rapid, evidence-informed decision-making, working with technical experts and researchers iteratively rather than asynchronously.
How do Tiger Teams support evidence for policy?
Tiger Teams utilise an integrated knowledge transfer (IKT) approach where evidence and insights are made more readily available earlier on in the policymaking process. The evidence is ‘packaged to be policymaker ready’, which means that the interpretation of evidence into policy is expediated through synthesis, identification of the most important issues and inequities, identifying unknowns and uncertainties, and highlighting potential solutions, risks and mitigation strategies. Knowledge is transferred through a commitment to active listening, structured interaction and dialogue.
Origins and adaptation
The term Tiger Team approach originates from NASA’s Apollo missions (1961-1972), where small groups of engineers were assembled to troubleshoot critical, life-threatening problems in real time (Pavlak, 2004a). Over the past two decades, this approach has migrated into domains beyond aerospace, including cybersecurity, healthcare, and public administration (Pavlak, 2004b). In the policy context, Tiger Teams are deployed as short-term, cross-functional groups tasked with producing actionable recommendations within a fixed timeframe (Evans, 2016).
Core characteristics of Tiger Teams
Policy-focused Tiger Teams share several defining features:
Mandated authority: They operate under explicit sponsorship from senior decision-makers, ensuring access to data, cross-departmental cooperation, and a clear path for recommendations to be adopted.
Cross-functional composition: Membership typically includes policy leads, operational managers, technical specialists, data analysts, and service user representatives.
Time-boxed operation: Teams work to a tightly defined schedule, most often 6–10 weeks, culminating in a final set of policy options and recommendations.
Evidence integration: Outputs combine quantitative data, service user narratives, and insights from the research literature, with findings graded for confidence.
Policy value of the Tiger Team approach
The Tiger Team model offers three distinct advantages for policymaking:
Agility with accountability. Unlike standing committees, Tiger Teams are time-limited and explicitly evaluated against deliverables such as interim findings and final recommendations.
Cross-boundary problem solving. Many contemporary policy challenges – digital transformation, welfare reform, climate adaptation – require solutions that cut across organisational silos. Tiger Teams are designed precisely for this mode of collaborative governance.
Integration of lived experience. By including service-user narratives alongside technical and operational analysis, Tiger Teams help ensure that recommendations are both implementable and socially legitimate.
Examples of Tiger Teams in action
U.S. Department of Labor – Unemployment Insurance Modernisation (1)
The U.S. Department of Labor deployed Tiger Teams to assist states in modernising their unemployment insurance (UI) systems. These multi-disciplinary teams focused on enhancing equity, accessibility, timeliness, and fraud prevention. They collaborated with state officials to identify challenges and implement actionable solutions, supported by allocated grant funding.
City of Calgary – Cross-Corporate Innovation (2)
The City of Calgary established a monthly "Tiger Team" comprising over 25 individuals from various sectors, including city staff, community groups, and citizens. This collaborative effort aimed to tackle complex urban issues by co-designing solutions, prototyping, and testing with users, thereby breaking down silos and fostering innovative problem-solving.
U.S. Department of Defense – Foreign Military Sales Process Improvement (3)
The Department of Defense formed a Tiger Team to analyse and improve the Foreign Military Sales (FMS) process. The team reviewed case studies, identified best practices, and engaged with allies, partner nations, and industry stakeholders to streamline the process and enhance efficiency.
New Orleans Police Department – Tactical Intelligence Gathering and Enforcement Response (TIGER) Team (4)
In New Orleans, a specialised TIGER Team was created to address armed robberies. This initiative involved expanding analytical capabilities and improving technological processes to enhance law enforcement's response to such crimes.
Stanford Center on Longevity – Designing for a 100-Year Life (5)
Stanford University's Center on Longevity implemented Tiger Teams to explore and design solutions for challenges associated with longer life expectancies. These teams brought together grassroots innovators and institutional leaders to co-create strategies for sustainable living and aging.
Supporting inclusion and equity in policymaking
A further strength of the Tiger Team approach lies in its ability to create structured mechanisms for hearing service user voices, particularly those from under-represented or marginalised groups. Traditional policymaking processes often privilege expert or institutional perspectives, leaving gaps in understanding how policies are experienced by citizens.
Tiger Teams explicitly incorporate user advocates and frontline perspectives within their membership and evidence-gathering processes. Short interviews, surveys, targeted engagement with community organisations, and analysis of complements and complaints or feedback data are used to surface diverse experiences. Embedding these narratives into policy briefs ensures that equity considerations are not treated as an afterthought, but as part of the evidence base shaping final recommendations.
Tiger Team approach supports inclusive and equitable policymaking by:
Elevating the voices of groups most affected by service failures or barriers.
Highlighting differential impacts across regions, demographics, or service channels.
Building legitimacy and trust in policy recommendations by demonstrating responsiveness to real-world experiences.
Practical Implications for Policymakers
To operationalise the Tiger Team model as a governance tool, policymakers can:
Standardise templates for scope and mandate, meeting schedules, and briefing outputs.
Embed sponsorship protocols so senior leaders can rapidly authorise Tiger Teams when crises or opportunities arise.
Develop evaluation frameworks to assess the quality, timeliness, and uptake of Tiger Team recommendations.
Cultivate a cadre of cross-functional leaders trained in rapid evidence synthesis and collaborative problem-solving.
Prioritise inclusion mechanisms so that each Tiger Team is mandated to integrate service-user voices and equity analysis.
Conclusion
Tiger Teams represent more than an ad hoc or reactive response mechanism to policy challenges; they are a proactive structured method for embedding agility, evidence, and cross-sector collaboration into policymaking. By institutionalising their use, governments can strengthen their capacity to respond to urgent and complex challenges while reinforcing accountability, inclusion, transparency, and public trust. The evolving pace and complexity of policymaking demand approaches that actively incorporate stakeholder knowledge and perspectives, building trust and legitimacy in decision-making.
Sources:
References:
Pavlak, A. (2004a). Project troubleshooting: tiger teams for reactive risk management. Project Management Journal, 35(4), 5-14.
Pavlak, A. (2004b). Modern Tiger Teams. https://www.futureofenergyinitiative.org/Pubs/MTT.pdf
Evans, J. P. (2016). Taking the tiger by the tail: Leading effective tiger teams and working groups on flight projects. In 2016 IEEE Aerospace Conference (pp. 1-6). IEEE.
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