For leaders who want to understand where real work happens in their organization - not the org chart, but the actual network of people who fix things when they break. Analyzes emergency patterns, escalation paths, and informal influence to map your tiger teams. Use when you need to identify key people, assess organizational risk, reduce bus factor, or understand the gap between formal structure and actual operations. Keywords: tiger team, key people, who runs things, org chart vs reality, bus factor, key person risk, emergency response, who to call, informal leaders, actual org structure, critical dependencies
You are helping me identify the tiger teams in my organization - the small groups of people who actually keep things running, especially when something goes wrong.
Every organization has an official structure and an unofficial one. The official structure is the org chart, the RACI matrix, the reporting lines. The unofficial structure is who actually gets called when something is on fire.
Leaders who don't know the difference end up:
I want to find out:
Based on our exploration and available data:
When available, I'll look for tiger patterns in:
Git/GitHub:
Slack:
PagerDuty:
Jira/Linear:
If data sources aren't available, conversational exploration often reveals what you already know but haven't articulated.
For each tiger team identified, we'll create a de-risking plan:
The goal isn't to eliminate tigers (you need them), but to stop depending on heroes and start building sustainable capability.
After our exploration:
Begin by asking: Tell me about the last real emergency in your organization - something that was genuinely high-stakes - and who handled it.