Behind Enemy Lines

Before the CIA existed, the US had the Office of Strategic Services, or OSS. During WWII, it conducted espionage, including sabotage. In an effort to slow down the Nazis, the OSS created the Simple Sabotage Field Manual, which is exactly what it sounds like: a guide to small, everyday acts that ordinary people could use to quietly disrupt work. No special skills, no training, just simple behaviours that would slowly drag down the productivity of the Nazi machine.

The manual was declassified in 2008, and it is a fascinating read. Mostly because, while reading some of the methods, it dawned on me that I have almost certainly worked with spies.

Some of the people I worked with seemed to follow that manual almost word for word. And some of the behaviour I have seen from managers and executives could easily be described as simple sabotage.

Of course, I am being cheeky here. I would like to believe those people were not trying to sabotage anything. But in the end, intention matters a lot less than results.

If you have spent more than a few months in a white-collar job, especially in a large company, you have probably met a spy yourself.

Here are a few lines from the Simple Sabotage Field Manual that I am sure you have seen more than once:

“When possible, refer all matters to committees, for ‘further study and consideration.’ Attempt to make the committees as large as possible — never less than five.”

What is it called in your company? Architecture Review Board? Engineering Council? Technical Review Board? Technical Strategy Council? The names vary, but the pattern is the same. One urgent decision turns into a 12-person steering committee with rotating delegates, three subcommittees, and a shared Google Doc that nobody has opened since week two.

The result is predictable. Decisions get delayed, deferred, stalled, and eventually buried. Meanwhile, nobody makes real progress.

“Hold conferences when there is more critical work to be done.”

This would be funny if it were not so common. There is actual work to do, often urgent work, but first there is an all-hands where an executive tells jokes or talks about the new snacks in the microkitchen.

Or worse, instead of letting engineers solve a problem, management calls a conference to discuss it.

In the end, time is wasted, nobody is better off for having attended, and the work still needs to be done.

“Make ‘speeches.’ Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your ‘points’ by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences.”

This one is painful. You are trying to get through a quick daily stand-up, and then someone decides it is their time to deliver a commencement speech. They talk about previous companies, unrelated situations, and lessons that may or may not apply. While everybody else quietly checks out, that one person consumes 90% of the meeting.

Sometimes people also ramble through points that were already discussed, or restate what somebody else just said in a longer and less useful way.

“Insist on doing everything through ‘channels.’ Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.”

One of the things I miss about working at a small company was how simple some decisions could be. I could stop by my boss’s desk and say, “I need to buy a license for this application.” He would hand me his credit card, I would type the numbers into the vendor’s site, and the whole thing would be done in less than three minutes.

Try that in a large company. First, a technical committee needs to review it. Then InfoSec needs to approve it. Then two or three levels of leadership need to sign off. And that is just the beginning. After that, you still need to enter the request into a procurement system, which triggers legal and compliance reviews, an NDA request, and possibly another working group to define how the license and its lifecycle will be managed.

“Advocate ‘caution.’ Be ‘reasonable’ and urge your fellow-conferees to be ‘reasonable’ and avoid haste which might result in embarrassments or difficulties later on.”

This tactic survives because it almost never sounds like obstruction. It sounds responsible.

You are building a feature that would help 90% of your customers. Then someone asks for another review, another assessment, and another round of stakeholder feedback. InfoSec needs two more weeks for a threat assessment. The account executive is worried about the 10% who are not covered. A manager wants to explore a few more options before committing.

Nobody says no. They just ask everyone to be careful, deliberate, and reasonable. Very often, the outcome is the same as if they had said no from the start.

“Multiply the procedures and clearances involved in issuing instructions… See that three people have to approve everything where one would do.”

This is the sacred corporate religion of alignment. Somewhere along the way, organizations convinced themselves that involving more people automatically leads to better decisions. In practice, it often leads to slower ones.

I am not sure whether people avoid making decisions because they are afraid of being blamed if things go wrong, or because spreading the decision across more people also spreads the accountability. Either way, something that one accountable person could have decided now requires a committee, three rounds of feedback, and a calendar invite called “Decision Meeting” that somehow ends without a decision.

That is what makes the Simple Sabotage Field Manual so funny, and also so uncomfortable. It was written as a guide for undermining an enemy organization, yet much of it reads like a normal day inside a large company.

Most of the people doing these things are not malicious. They are not spies. They are usually following incentives, habits, or processes that nobody has seriously questioned in years. But the effect is often the same: less clarity, less speed, less ownership, and less work getting done.

That is the genius of simple sabotage. It does not require dramatic failure. It only requires enough friction, delay, and confusion to make progress feel impossible.

Read the manual, then look at your calendar. If the similarities feel a little too strong, you probably know what to fix first.