Hey Changemakers,
My Pop could be the funniest person in any room, which made him either a great dinner guest or a terrifying spy trainer. He was both. He taught spies the craft of espionage and kept that particular detail from his own family until he retired. I grew up going to his office as a kid, saw “Central Intelligence Agency” right there on the door, and still somehow bought the State Department cover story for years.
I’ve been thinking about Pop a lot lately because a friend recently shared the CIA’s Simple Sabotage Field Manual, a 1944 guide for ordinary citizens in occupied territories on how to disrupt enemy operations from within. Gobsmacked at first, I laughed out loud. Pop would have loved this thing.
Then I kept reading, and I stopped laughing quite so hard.
The Playbook We’ve Accidentally Adopted
The manual includes a section on “General Interference with Organizations and Production,” with specific moves designed to make operations grind slowly, then completely, to a halt. Here are a few, verbatim:
- Insist on doing everything through “channels.” Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.
- 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.
- Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions.
- Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to re-open the question of the advisability of that decision.
- Advocate “caution.” Be “reasonable” and urge your fellow-conferees to be “reasonable” and avoid haste, which might result in embarrassments or difficulties later on.
- Be worried about the propriety of any decision. Raise the question of whether such action as is contemplated lies within the jurisdiction of the group or whether it might conflict with the policy of some higher echelon.
- Hold conferences when there is more critical work to be done.
- Multiply the procedures and clearances involved in issuing instructions, paychecks, and so on. See that three people have to approve everything where one would do.
Go ahead and read that again. I’ll wait.
Meetings about meetings. Endless reruns of decisions already made. Caution deployed so liberally that it becomes a permanent condition rather than a posture. Ringing any bells? These were designed as sabotage tactics. And yet here they are, looking at home in nonprofit land.
Here’s the part worth sitting with, though: I’m not saying that a thoughtful process, consensus-building, or slowing down is a bad thing. These tactics work as sabotage precisely because they’re so hard to distinguish from healthy practices. That ambiguity is the whole point, and it’s what makes this worth examining honestly.
Healthy Process Needs a Deadline
A healthy process has an endpoint.
Gather opinions. Pursue further study. Question decisions and then re-question them. All of that is legitimate. But do it with a firm deadline, after which you collate what you’ve learned and move forward. If your committee keeps finding reasons to table, if caution has quietly become an excuse to avoid risk entirely, if every meeting ends with “let’s study this more,” that’s not good process. That’s a spy manual wearing a blazer.
The reason these tactics are so hard to catch is that you’re usually too busy running the meeting to notice you’re in one. That’s where Dee Hock’s discipline from Birth of the Chaordic Age comes in: take 35-50% of your management time and spend it managing yourself. Not your team, not your board, not your strategic plan. That’s how you develop the distance to spot what’s actually happening in the room, and the clarity to do something about it. Where am I insisting on channels when something more direct and streamlined would help everyone? Where am I calling for caution when what we actually need is courage? And, most important: what’s the deadline? Because a process without one isn’t deliberation. It’s just sabotage with better manners.
Pop would have laughed at this manual and then gotten very quiet. He understood that the most effective interference doesn’t look like interference at all. It looks completely reasonable.
So borrow a spy’s eye. Learn to tell the difference. Your organization is counting on it.
My father’s daughter,
Kimberley
This Month’s Discussion Questions
- Read the CIA list one more time. Which tactic shows up most in your organization, and which one shows up most in you?
- Where are you currently calling for “caution,” and is it protecting something real, or protecting you from discomfort? If you’re brave, bring this one to your team.
- Name one decision your organization is sitting on right now. What would it take to give it a deadline, and who needs to be in the room when you do?
