How Businesses Sabotage Themselves: Insights From a 1944 CIA Manual

I have a tendency to wander down rabbit holes on Friday evenings. Newsletters, obscure resources, random PDFs — I’ll dive in with no particular plan, just curiosity and a desire to see what the internet has stashed away.

Last Friday was no different. Somewhere between my habitual scrolling and half-hearted attempts to be productive, I stumbled across something remarkable: the Simple Sabotage Field Manual, published by the Office of Strategic Services in 1944.

It had been declassified in 2008, but the content felt almost timeless. The manual is essentially a guide on how ordinary people could sabotage enemy organisations — subtly, invisibly, efficiently.

And as I read it, I couldn’t help but think: this reads like a “Ways of Working” handbook for some companies today. Not in the sense of deliberate sabotage, of course, but in the way good intentions, rigid processes, and misaligned priorities can grind a business to a halt.

After some additional digging — and yes, more internet rabbit holes — I discovered the ZINE newsletter. Now subscribed, of course. The authors referenced the same manual and highlighted many of the same sabotage techniques I had already flagged. Great minds think alike — or perhaps we just spend too much time noticing inefficiencies in companies.

As you read the following, I want you to think about your own workplace. How many of these behaviours feel familiar? How many of them are “business as usual”?

Listen to the podcast, or read on for more:

How to Sabotage a Company

Use Channels with no shortcuts

“Insist on doing everything through ‘channels.’ Never permit shortcuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.”

Ah yes, the classic bureaucracy trap.

Create RAPIDS, decision-making guides, RACI matrices, Target Operating Models, and make sure at least one person has the “D” in the org design — but they can’t actually use it because other people outrank them.

Awesome, a pseudo decision-maker who can do nothing. If you’ve ever been stuck waiting for someone to “approve the chain,” you know exactly what this feels like.

Talk - endlessly

“Make speeches. Talk as frequently as possible and at great length.”

I love this one. If you’ve taken the Communication Superpower Course, you’ll know exactly how to deal with it. These are the people who slow everything down under the guise of communication. They are not sharing information — they are sabotaging productivity.

Use Committees

“Refer all matters to committees for further study and consideration. Attempt to make the committees as large as possible—never less than five.”

Committees. The graveyards of good ideas. If a proposal enters a committee, it often emerges transformed — or buried. The manual advises large committees for maximum inefficiency. Sound familiar?

Be Picky

“Haggle over precise wordings of communications.”

Ah, the art of being picky and having an opinion about every word.

Everyone has an opinion, and the more minor the point, the louder it gets. The result? Miscommunication, wasted energy, and a climate of mistrust.

Keep having meetings

“Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting.”

Repeat meetings. The same topic, the same arguments, the same people. Decisions are rarely questioned for clarity — they’re questioned for delay. Repetition becomes a tool of stagnation.

Slow everything down

“Advocate ‘caution’ and urge your fellow-conferees to be ‘reasonable’ and avoid haste.”

Slow things down to a glacial pace. This is subtle sabotage: not illegal, not malicious, just painstakingly slow. Business becomes a careful crawl. It happens in SO many organisations – not on purpose – where the slowness becomes a challenge to shipping value and remaining competitive in the market.

Everything is important

“Insist on perfect work in relatively unimportant products.”

Perfection is often the enemy of relevance. Waiting for everything to be “just right” often means it is too late. Customers have moved on, competitors have innovated, and the opportunity is gone.

Apply this to emails, presentations, small projects — and watch momentum evaporate.

Reward Mediocrity and poor behaviours

“To lower morale, and with it production, be pleasant to inefficient workers; give them undeserved promotions.”

Brilliant. Reward mediocrity, lower expectations, create frustration among high performers. I’ve written about this before, and it’s astonishing how often it happens unnoticed.

Don't use your initiative

“Demand written orders.”

If it isn’t in an email, it doesn’t exist. Nothing happens until someone sends a formal instruction — and even then, it has to pass through several layers. Slowness dressed up as precision and due diligence.

Get those questions in

“Ask endless questions.”

Questions are healthy — they create clarity, drive alignment, encourage critical thinking. But endless questions, or the wrong questions, freeze decision-making. It’s a form of self-inflicted paralysis – and some people are masters at this.

Create a very thorough review process

“See that three people have to approve everything where one would do.”

Steer-Co, committees, redundant approvals. More people involved does not mean better decisions; it often means delayed action. Ensure at all times three people have to review everything – ideally making sure that at least one of them is out of the office at any given time.

We're doing this to ourselves

As I read through these ideas for sabotage, it struck me how similar they are to behaviours we tolerate in modern enterprises, particularly in large organisations.

It’s fascinating — and alarming — how easily sabotage can be achieved unintentionally. Many of these activities feel like due diligence, caution, or thoroughness. And yet, collectively, they slow the organisation down, drain energy, frustrate high performers, and dilute impact.

This is exactly what we aim to tackle when we’re Releasing Agility.

These Sabotage tactics are not the result of malice. Often, they arise from good intentions: people are trying to be careful, inclusive, or compliant. And yet, the results are the same as if someone had sat down and deliberately tried to sabotage productivity.

Think of it this way: in many large organisations, these behaviours are institutionalised. They are reinforced in training, celebrated in processes, and rewarded in performance reviews. And the irony? The people doing this often believe they are being helpful, thorough, and professional. But in reality, they are part of a self-perpetuating system that slows everything down.

Old Tactics - Still Relevant

When I compare this to modern work, it’s astonishing how often these old tactics from a 1940s sabotage manual apply. Committees, approval chains, excessive caution, perfectionism, endless discussions — these are the everyday frustrations that kill momentum. And yet, we accept them because they feel legitimate.

We rarely step back and ask: is this helping us achieve our goals? Or is it simply busy work masked as progress?

I also noticed a pattern: organisations with these behaviours tend to have a few things in common:

• They overvalue process over outcome
• They reward activity over impact
• They mistake caution for competence.
• They believe that slowing everything down protects them from risk — but what it really does is slow them out of relevance.

This is where the concept of Releasing Agility becomes critical. Releasing Agility isn’t about breaking rules for the sake of it. It’s about recognising when behaviours, processes, or systems are effectively sabotaging outcomes — and systematically removing those barriers.

It’s about aligning people, purpose, and process so that decision-making is fast, communication is clear, and action is aligned with strategy.

We don't Sabotage by intent

The above Sabotage ideas serve as a stark reminder: sabotage doesn’t need intent. It can be embedded in the very routines, processes, and “ways of working” we claim to uphold.

Awareness is the first step to change. Once you notice these behaviours, you can challenge them, adjust them, and, ultimately, reclaim energy, speed, and focus.

And here’s the kicker: this isn’t just theory. I’ve seen organisations get trapped in this exact cycle. They meet, they debate, they rerun the same topics, they demand perfect execution on unimportant items — and they wonder why performance feels sluggish. These behaviours aren’t new; they’ve been around for decades, codified in a CIA manual, and now reflected in enterprise practices worldwide.

So, what can we do?

First, notice it. Identify where decision-making is unnecessarily slow, where communication is cluttered, and where process trumps outcome.

Second, challenge it. Are all committees necessary? Could decisions be made with fewer approvals? Can perfection be traded for speed and learning?

Third, act. Remove unnecessary steps, clarify responsibilities, streamline communication, and empower people to make decisions without waiting for “permission” from layers of hierarchy.

And if you’ve read this far, ask yourself: what “sabotage” is quietly embedded in your workplace? Which processes, meetings, approvals, or behaviours are slowing everything down, creating frustration, or dampening morale? Once you see it, you can act. Once you act, you start to release agility.

We don’t need a secret manual from 1944 to teach us how to slow ourselves down. We just need awareness, courage, and a willingness to act differently. And when we do, the results can be extraordinary: faster decisions, more motivated teams, better outcomes — and a workplace where energy is spent on creation, not delay.

So next Friday, when you’re wandering down your own rabbit hole of newsletters and PDFs, maybe you’ll stumble upon something that changes the way you see work. Or maybe, like me, you’ll discover that the keys to agility have been sitting quietly in a declassified CIA manual all along, waiting for you to notice.