SIMPLE SABOTAGE by Robert M. Galford, Bob Frisch, Cary Greene

• Occurring on a wide scale, simple sabotage will be a constant and tangible drag on the war efforts of the enemy.”
• These are the eight tactics from the Simple Sabotage Field Manual:
• “Insist on doing everything through ‘channels.’ Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.”
• “Make ‘speeches.’ Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your ‘points’ by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences. Never hesitate to make a few appropriate ‘patriotic’ comments.”
• “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.”
• “Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.”
• “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.”
• OSS leaders didn’t want members of the Resistance caught and killed. That’s why the tactics they taught had strong plausible deniability. These are good behaviors, but taken to an extreme. That’s why they are insidious.
• But rooting out these corrosive behaviors isn’t so simple, since they are often mutant excesses of laudable aspects of organizational life and group behavior—enforcing rules, checking that processes have been followed correctly, involving co-workers in decisions and seeing that decisions are made in the right way.
• Exposing and inoculating any working group against sabotage requires several stages:
• Identify: Spot sabotage as it occurs, and help others see when a positive behavior has crossed the line into becoming counterproductive or destructive.
• Calibrate: Put into place the right expectation for tolerance—the range of acceptable behaviors—so that productive behavior is encouraged, but sabotage is prevented.
• Remediate: Give everyone in the organization the permission, the language, and the techniques to call out damaging behaviors in a constructive way.
• Inoculate: Introduce tools, metrics, and process changes to prevent the sabotage from recurring (or from occurring in the first place) and to help develop a low-sabotage culture.
• Sabotage by Obedience Insist on doing everything through channels. Never permit shortcuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.
• Organizations run more smoothly most of the time if everyone is following instructions set with no variability. But obedience becomes Sabotage by Obedience—instantly—when it prevents personal judgment from overriding processes that for whatever reason are not working at that moment.
• You probably know who the squeaky wheels are in your group. These are the people who are out of line a lot; they probably try your nerves. But they’re easy to spot. To ferret out the Obedient Saboteurs (and the flawed rules they may be following), you have to look for the people who don’t make any noise at all.
• To get a sense of where the norms are, create a bell curve where the middle of the curve shows the number of exceptions to the rule that you would expect to see.
• it will be clear, by looking at the far right side of the curve, which employees are pushing the limits on your guidelines—who
• But it will also be clear who works at the other extreme—those
• Ultimately, those people probably represent the more grievous threat. They’re not your squeaky wheels. They’re invisible. But their behavior is slowly, surely, building rigidity into your company—rigidity that can cause it to crack.
• Exposing the “hidden” side of the curve is a big step toward eliminating Sabotage by Obedience.
• You want your metrics—the things you measure and the ways you measure them—to reinforce your processes and drive the outcomes you seek.
• You will inadvertently create Obedient Saboteurs if you reward people for adhering to the rules even when common sense tells them not to.
• some organizations chase a particular outcome or performance metric simply because they have become accustomed to the chase itself and have lost any sense of what a reasonable stopping point might be.
• Continuous improvement is a business philosophy created by W. Edwards Deming in the mid-twentieth century. This philosophy thinks of processes as systems and holds that if each component of the system constantly tries to both increase quality and reduce costs, efficiency and success will follow.
• But taken to an extreme, even continuous improvement can lead to sabotage.
• Organizations, like people, can become addicted to self-improvement.
• When people are worn down, they often follow the rules with glazed eyes and shut minds. They may not realize when a rule is hurting their ability to get work done well.
• Sometimes when people use their own judgment, they’re going to be wrong (read: they’re going to make what you think is a bad decision). In the interests of the greater good, those mistakes must be tolerated. An old saying sums this up pretty well: “Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment.”
• But perhaps there’s no better way to protect your organization against obedient sabotage than to celebrate examples of when people use good judgment—even if the person you’re praising has broken the rules.
• If your group or organization does a lot of things simply because “That’s the way we’ve always done them,” it’s probably time to give your processes a spring cleaning.
• Here’s a painless way to overhaul some of your processes. Put someone with experience through the new-employee orientation for that person’s function. See whether he or she thinks new employees are being told to do the right things, for the right reasons.
• Obedient Saboteurs are not harmless.
• Obedient Saboteurs can destroy the productivity of your group and rob it of its true potential.
• Sabotage by Speech Make “speeches.” Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your “points” by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences.
• There’s nothing specifically wrong about occasionally indulging in monologues at staff meetings. When done right, they can inspire, inform, and direct. They can call people to action.
• But talking too much, too frequently, can delay or derail a discussion long enough to make everyone just a little late for their next task and maybe just confused enough, agitated enough—or dulled enough—to make a mistake.
• The first step to countering Sabotage by Speech is to understand the many forms it can take.
• Clearly, we all need to talk; we need to contribute to conversations and participate in meetings in order to get our work done.
• Long Talkers go on and on every time they speak—whether on a conference call or a video chat or at a meeting in person. When they are asked a question, they never answer with a quick “yes” or “no.”
• Long Talkers rob us of our time.
• Tangent Talkers barrel off in a direction that may only marginally relate to what the meeting is about, if it relates at all.
• Lost Talkers start speaking with the best of intentions. They really do think that they have something meaningful to contribute to the conversation. But before too long (in fact, sometimes within thirty seconds or so), it becomes apparent that it’s going to take them a while to figure out what that “something meaningful” is.
• Lost Talkers aren’t Speech Saboteurs when they have a proven record for being insightful, and “lost” really means that they have a clearer grasp of the big picture and are “ahead of everyone else” in understanding it (which is why everyone else has a hard time following).
• Lost Talkers are Speech Saboteurs when they are chronic offenders. Or when it is increasingly clear that they have lost their train of thought but keep talking, trying to find it again.
• Sensitive Talkers understand that people learn in different ways, and that just because they think they have explained something thoroughly doesn’t mean that people get it—so they repeat their message or say the same thing in a different way so that everyone “gets it.”
• “Oh! Oh!” Talkers are like Hermione Granger of the Harry Potter books and movies. They know the topic inside and out, and they are the people who cut to the chase and save the group a lot of time by helping everyone home in quickly on what matters most. The speeches of “Oh! Oh!” Talkers often deliver the insight that people put to good use later on.
• But “Oh! Oh!” Talkers can also be Speech Saboteurs. Sometimes, they feel the need to contribute to every conversation even when the discussion is not within the scope of their areas of expertise or knowledge.
• At the beginning of any group discussion, remind everyone how long the meeting is supposed to be and then appoint someone formally to keep track of time and interrupt people as needed.
• Give meeting participants something tangible—an agenda or specific goals—that you can all use to keep yourselves on track.
• The sheer amount of data available to bring to bear on almost any topic these days can subtly encourage many types of Speech Saboteurs. To be effective contributors to meetings, people are often expected to be able to convert data into insight, and insight into usable insight, and there’s real skill involved in doing that. It doesn’t come naturally to most people.
• The goal in any meeting is to foster usable insights that are then actually used to render a positive result. Any meeting that does that has been a good meeting.
• Sabotage by Committee 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.
• committees represent the possibility for accountability to be lost.
• When a larger group delegates something to a committee, control of the task or activity goes off the radar of the group’s leader.
• Many times, committees are left to devise their own ground rules, which can mean that the committee never bothers to set any rules.
• Often, no one is explicitly made head of the committee, and so no one is responsible for the work of the committee getting done.
• When an individual is delegated a task, someone is clearly in charge. But if the work is too large for a single person and a temporary committee is formed, that accountability may be diluted or lost completely.
• As our friends in the OSS no doubt understood only too well, committees, by their very nature, have tunnel vision. Once they are formed around a mandate, they often find it difficult to change course in the middle of their work—even if a change is warranted.
• Finally, committees . . . can be . . . sluggishly . . . slow.
• The best way to stop an idea dead in its tracks without actually having to disagree with anything is to assign it to a committee—preferably one, like Ben’s suggested committee, with a diverse membership, no clear objectives, and no deadlines.
• If no single person ultimately has accountability for resolving an issue or coming to closure, then there’s a good chance the group is an unsuspecting victim of inadvertent Sabotage by Committee.
• If no one has articulated what the outcome of the committee’s work is—a report, a recommendation, an action—then the committee is in trouble.
• All three of the issues just discussed—no mechanism to close on an agreement, no goals, and no deadlines—have a common root cause: Nobody is in charge.
• Decisions need owners, and a committee can’t be an owner. A person needs to be the owner. And so a person needs to be delegated the authority to be in charge of the final decision of the committee.
• Using RACI to great effect involves remembering just four phrases: Responsible—the team. Accountable—one person. Consulted—before a decision is made. Informed—after a decision is made.
• Keep committees small and nimble to prevent them from becoming breeding grounds of Sabotage by Committee.
• The most common way to populate a committee is to ask for volunteers. That’s because being on a committee generally represents an effort above and beyond a person’s regular job. So if someone volunteers, that person is acknowledging that he or she can make room in their schedule to take on another responsibility. While that may be the easiest way to get a committee going, it is often not the best way. Those volunteers may not be the right people to get the job done.
• Wisdom is about having the ability to recognize patterns and to make connections where others might not—abilities that come from years of experience.
• Try this simple fix. Either set a deadline, if you created or chair a committee, or ask for a deadline, if you’re a committee member. Set a clear outcome, or “deliverable,” that needs to be ready by that deadline. Or if you’re not in a position to set a deliverable, at least ask that you be given one.
• Clarity is the “simplicity on the other side of complexity.”
• Spotting sabotage when others commit it is difficult, but spotting sabotage when you are the saboteur is even harder.
• Sabotage by Haggling Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions.
• Haggling over communications is natural; we’re hardwired to do it. Unfortunately, we’re also hardwired to do too much of it.
• Sabotage by Reopening Decisions Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to reopen the question of the advisability of that decision.
• That’s the best way to stop the Reopening Decisions Saboteur in his or her tracks. Ask, “What’s changed since we made our decision?” If nothing has, then there’s no reason to move backwards.
• It’s impossible to take biases out of decision-making, but it’s good to be aware of the influence they can have.
• One tool we have used (and seen used) effectively to inoculate organizations from acts of sabotage related to individuals not expressing their opinions candidly and directly is to establish the following ground rule: Qui tacet consentire videtur, or “Silence denotes consent.”
• Err on the side of too much care, or hesitation, and you might sabotage yourself or your group, despite your best intentions.
• Sabotage by Is-It-Really-Our-Call? 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.
• There’s no faster way to stall decision-making than by seeding doubt in the minds of those who are making the decisions: Do they have the right to make the call at all?
• Often, the reason why people question the authority of a group to make a decision stems from lack of confidence—in themselves or in the group.
• If you aren’t in charge of the group and suspect there’s ambiguity about what the group needs to make a decision on, speak up. Try to seek clarity from the group itself or whoever assigned your group the task to make the decision in the first place.
• Successful organizations make and execute decisions faster than their competitors.
• Modern Sabotage by CC: Everyone CC: Everyone. Send updates as frequently as possible, including in the distribution list anyone even peripherally involved.
• Take Yourself Off as Many Distribution Lists as Possible.
• Being deluged with information is not the same as being informed.