How to Sabotage an Organization, INN.LAW

Peter PoleacovUpdated 27 July 20267 min

In 1944 the Office of Strategic Services, the wartime intelligence service of the United States and the predecessor of the CIA, issued a manual for civilians in occupied Europe. It was not about explosives. It was about people who went to an office or a factory in the morning and home again in the evening, and about how they could cripple the enemy’s war economy from that desk without being noticed. One chapter is headed “General Interference with Organizations and Production”. It does not open with tools. It opens with meetings.

Read that list today and you will not recognize the enemy. You will recognize your own approval process.

Eight points from the manual

The instructions for organizations and conferences, verbatim:

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.

A second chapter addresses managers and supervisors. It instructs them to multiply the procedures and clearances involved, so that three people have to approve everything where one would do. Alongside that: multiply paper work in plausible ways. Ask endless questions and “misunderstand” orders. And, as number fourteen, apply all regulations to the last letter.

Source: United States, Office of Strategic Services, Simple Sabotage Field Manual, 1944.

The trick is that you cannot tell the difference

The manual explains its own method, and that part is more interesting than the list. Its authors distinguish sabotage that destroys something from a second kind that needs no tools at all.

The saboteur is told to find out which faulty decisions already occur in his workplace and to design his sabotage so as to enlarge that margin for error. Not to invent new mistakes, but to extend the existing ones. That is why the method works: every single act on the list is defensible on its own. Nobody can refute point 7. Caution is a virtue, precision about wording is my profession, and the question of authority is regularly the right one in corporate matters. The sabotage does not sit in the behavior. It sits in the quantity and the timing.

On the left, a conscientious approval process. On the right, the field manual of a wartime intelligence service. The list is the same one.

What this costs in the contracting process

Translated into the working day of a company that concludes contracts, the list looks like this.

Channels

A quotation passes through sales, legal, procurement, and management, each station with its own follow-up date. Nobody is against approvals. It is just that few people count how many there are, and fewer still count what the time between the stations costs.

Committees

A clause that two people could settle in ten minutes goes to a steering group of seven with a fixed meeting cycle. The manual calls for committees of never less than five, and the reason is not the number but the distribution: in a group that size nobody carries the decision alone, and the person who could carry it is often not at the table.

Haggling over wording

Two legal departments exchange six rounds of redlines on a liability clause that will fail German standard-terms control anyway. The rounds were not wrong; they were in the wrong place. What actually decides liability is usually the statement of work, and nobody in those rounds is talking about it. Why that is so is set out in “Why contracts fail on the statement of work”.

Reopening

A clause was settled in round two. In round five it is back on the list, because a new participant has joined and the decision was never recorded anywhere. That is point 6, and it is the most expensive one, because it devalues the work of every round before it.

Caution

Every deviation from the template is elevated into a matter of principle. The result is not a safe contract but an unconcluded one. Falling back on the default statutory position is sometimes more expensive than the attackable clause, but that calculation is rarely done in those rounds.

What the company loses here is not only time. World Commerce & Contracting puts the value erosion from contracts at an average of 8.6 percent of contract value, and most of the causes it names do not sit in the contract text but in handovers, ownership, and follow-up – precisely the field this manual describes. On how robust that figure is and where its limits lie: “Contract management decides your margin”.

Inversion

The mental model behind the manual is inversion. Instead of asking how a process succeeds, you ask how it reliably fails, and then work backwards. The question “How do we make our contract approvals faster?” produces statements of intent. The question “How would I paralyze this approval process if I set out to do it and was not allowed to be noticed?” produces a defect list, in ten minutes and without consultants.

The reason is simple: failure can be described more concretely than success. An intelligence service that had to put a set of instructions into the hands of an entire population could not afford statements of intent.

Where the analogy ends

I do half of this list for a living. I haggle over wording, I advocate caution, and I ask about authority, because a signature without power of representation is a real problem. Anyone who takes from this article that review is sabotage has read it wrongly, and I would have written it badly.

The difference lies in a single question: does this step serve the decision or its postponement? A six-figure liability risk justifies six rounds of redlines. A standard order worth 4,000 euros does not, and in many companies it still travels the same route. The 1944 manual attacks exactly this point. It does not ask anyone to do something senseless. It asks them to apply sensible things indiscriminately to everything.

One more admission: the comparison breaks down in one place. The saboteur intends harm; the colleagues in the approval loop do not. That does not make the effect smaller, but it rules out the accusation. Anyone who tackles these patterns with blame will not remove them, only push them into a more polite form.

Four adjustments

None of these measures is new, and none is expensive. They simply rarely occur to anyone, because the usual question is how to get better, not how to hold yourself up most reliably.

Reference: Poleacov, P. (2026). How to Sabotage an Organization. INN.LAW. https://inn.law/en/perspectives/sabotage/