IN 1944, back in the days of the Second World War, the precursor to the CIA was called the Office of Strategic Services (OSS).
As part of the war effort, the OSS published and distributed a pamphlet with the title “Simple Sabotage Field Manual”. It has since been declassified and is available to the general public. It’s a fascinating read.
The guide was intended to give instructions to ‘normal’ people who were sympathetic to the Allied cause, but living in Axis countries, who wanted to help the war effort by disrupting or sabotaging factories, offices, transport etc and generally creating subtle mayhem in everyday life.
There were all sorts of suggestions, from those James Bond (or maybe MacGyver; the original one) might employ, to the just plain weird; such as bringing a bag of moths to a film in order to ruin the show, issuing two tickets for the same seat on trains in order to create arguments among the passengers, or deliberately driving past and ‘missing’ bus stops that army officers might be standing at.
The really interesting parts for a HR professional, however, relate to the workplace. Take a look at some of the (paraphrased) suggestions from the guide (instructions, remember, that were designed to cause difficulty, inflict problems, create issues and impact productivity):
• Never allow shortcuts.
• Always make people follow procedures to the letter and make sure there are plenty of steps, permissions and clearances involved.
• Make long speeches, talk as much as possible, giving plenty of personal anecdotes.
• Raise irrelevant issues as much as possible.
• Spread rumours.
• Be as irritating and argumentative as possible.
• Debate the precise meaning or words used in communications, the content of minutes etc.
• Focus on the irrelevant minutia.
• Refer everything back to committees for further study and debate previous decisions that were made wherever possible.
• Give important jobs and tasks to inefficient people.
• Also give these people promotions to lower morale among the competent staff
• Insist on perfection, in particular for meaningless tasks
• Work slowly at your job and invent disruptions to help you do so
• Don’t teach anything useful to new workers.
• In fact, give them misleading or incomplete instructions.
• Deliberately misunderstand instructions and ask for them in writing.
• Blame bad work on tools and equipment etc.
Now stop and think about what you have just read.
Do any of these practices or behaviours sound familiar? Do you encounter some or all of these on perhaps a weekly or even daily basis as part of ‘normal’ working life in 2022? I’ll bet you do.
Then reflect on the fact that these were actually suggestions for disputing enemy work, for causing as much chaos and lost productivity as possible in subtle, passive aggressive, everyday ways.
It’s crazy. We are all supposed to be pulling together but we are in fact diligently following the sabotage guide at work, inflicting pain on ourselves and our businesses.
The starting point of any solution however is understanding there is a problem in the first place. So once we take stock and see how much of this happens in our own place of work we can work to counteract the (self) sabotage.
A good way to solve problems like these are to reverse engineer from the (poor) outcomes and work your way back through the steps involved that got you to that point, questioning why the resulting actions happen at each juncture.
Why do we have so many meetings? Do we need perfection or can we accept ‘good enough’ for some things?
What do we do to wind other people up and can we change our behaviour to be less irritating? Do we have a coherent, relevant plan for what we teach new staff? Is there a way to empower decision making at the lowest level possible / first point of contact in the organisation?
If we start asking drilling down into why these bad behaviours occur, we can put steps in place to make sure they don’t happen: aiming to remove the link and make the impact at the earliest point in the chain of events.
The Beastie Boys once said “I can’t stand it, I know you planned it… I’m tellin’ y’all it’s sabotage” but let’s not fall for those tricks; let’s work smarter.
:: Barry Shannon is head of HR at STATSports
