Sabotage any Strategy

15 ways to kill-off a strategic idea

Strategy-making for any important endeavor involves group-work. Groups mean collaboration.

What are the different ways you can kill that collaboration? Make it ineffectual, make it impotent.

The American pre-cursor to the CIA, the OSS, actually published a field manual for this in 1944. The objective was to undermine the Axis powers from within by helping spies in Europe with some tactics and tricks that would sabotage Axis day-to-day operations. Some entries:

1. Insist on doing everything through channels. Never permit short-cuts to be taken to expedite decisions.

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

3. 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.

4. Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.

5. Haggle over precise wording of communications, minutes, and resolutions.

6. Refer back to a matter decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to re-open the question of the advisability of that decision.

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

8. Be worried about the propriety of any decision. Raise the question of whether [it] lies within the jurisdiction of the group or whether it might conflict with the policy of some higher decision.

Writer and storyteller Matthew Dicks has graciously augmented this list in a recent book, with an addition and amplification of seven additional sabotage techniques by a colleague, Anne McGrath: