How to Sabotage an Organization, INN.LAW

Peter Poleacov21 February 2025 (updated 5 October 2026)7 min

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

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

Eight points from the manual

The first subsection contains 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.

The next subsection addresses managers and supervisors. It instructs them to multiply the procedures and clearances involved. Three people are to approve everything where one would do. The managers are also to multiply paper work in plausible ways. They are to ask endless questions and “misunderstand” orders. Number fourteen tells them to 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 authors also explain their method in the manual. That part is more interesting than the list. They distinguish sabotage that destroys something from a second kind that needs no destructive tools at all.

The saboteur is told to find out which faulty decisions already occur in his workplace. He is to design his sabotage so as to enlarge that margin for error. Not to invent new mistakes, but to extend the existing ones. The method works because every single act on the list is defensible on its own. Nobody can refute point 7. Caution is a virtue, and precision about wording is my profession. The question of authority is regularly the right one in corporate matters. What turns the behavior into sabotage is its quantity and its 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. 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. The reason is not the number but the distribution. In a group that size nobody is accountable for the decision alone. The person who could be is often not at the table.

Haggling over wording

Two legal departments exchange six rounds of redlines on a liability clause. In the end it still fails German standard-terms control. It remains a standard term because the party that proposed it was not seriously prepared in any round to change the core of the clause. The work in those rounds was sound in itself but went into the wrong clause. 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. 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.

The company loses time and money here. World Commerce & Contracting puts the value erosion from contracts at an average of 8.6 percent of contract value. Most of the causes it names do not lie in the contract text but in handovers, ownership, and follow-up. That is precisely the field this manual describes. I explain how reliable that figure is and where its limits lie in “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. It takes ten minutes and no consultants.

That is because failure can be described more concretely than success. An intelligence service that had to give an entire population a set of instructions 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. A signature without power of representation is a real problem. Anyone who concludes 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 exploits exactly this difference. It asks for nothing senseless, only that sensible things be applied indiscriminately to everything.

I also admit that the comparison fails at one point. The saboteur intends harm; the colleagues in the approval process 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; they will return in a more polite form.

Four adjustments

None of these measures is new, and none is expensive. They simply rarely occur to anyone. 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/