10 Ways to Counter Bureaucratic Sabotage

In 1944, the U.S. Office of Strategic Services published the Simple Sabotage Field Manual to provide basic doctrine for soldiers during WWII.

Would you be surprised to know this is being employed today within our own Government organizations?

Section 11: General Interference with Organizations and Production

(a) Organizations and Conferences

1. Insist on doing everything through “channels.” Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order 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. Never hesitate to make a few appropriate “patriotic” comments.

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 wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions.

6. Refer back to matters 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 such action as is contemplated lies within the jurisdiction of the group or whether it might conflict with the policy of some higher echelon.

(b) Managers and Supervisors

1. Demand written orders.

2. “Misunderstand” orders. Ask endless questions or engage in long correspondence about such orders. Quibble over them when you can.

3. Do everything possible to delay the delivery of orders. Even though parts of an order may be ready beforehand, don’t deliver it until it is completely ready.

4. Don’t order new working materials until your current stocks have been virtually exhausted, so that the slightest delay in filling your order will mean a shutdown.

5. Order high-quality materials which are hard to get. If you don’t get them argue about it. Warn that inferior materials will mean inferior work.

6. In making work assignments, always sign out the unimportant jobs first. See that the important jobs are assigned to inefficient workers of poor machines.

7. Insist on perfect work in relatively unimportant products; send back for refinishing those which have the least flaw. Approve other defective parts whose flaws are not visible to the naked eye.

8. Make mistakes in routing so that parts and materials will be sent to the wrong place in the plant.

9. When training new workers, give incomplete or misleading instructions.

10. To lower morale and with it, production, be pleasant to inefficient workers; give them undeserved promotions. Discriminate against efficient workers; complain unjustly about their work.

11. Hold conferences when there is more critical work to be done.

12. Multiply paper work in plausible ways. Start duplicate files.

13. Multiply the procedures and clearances involved in issuing instructions, pay checks, and so on. See that three people have to approve everything where one would do.

14. Apply all regulations to the last letter.

How many of these have you encountered working within DoD and Congress?

The first step is to recognize the sabotage, whether intentional or just bad bureaucratic practices.

Strategies to counter the sabotage:

1. Call it out. While not impugning the motives of others, identify the actions that will fail to achieve the desired outcomes. Seek first to understand their perspectives and incentives to identify potential solutions to address issues.

2. Empower small, high-performing teams. Stop the practice of establishing a working group and senior steering group with representatives from 10 different stakeholder organizations to work an issue or initiative. A few motivated, forward leaning folks can engage the stakeholders, but stay small and move fast to iterate on a solution. This will be 10X faster and more effective than endless meetings with too many people in the room. The key is for the team to actively engage the key stakeholders early to understand their perspectives, inputs, and challenges, and later to provide feedback on draft solutions to garner their buy-in to support and execute the way ahead.

3. Control the process. Do not let the saboteurs implement delays over wordsmithing or filibustering meetings. Focus on speed of delivery, not perfection.

4. Enable an iterative approach whenever possible. For enterprise-wide changes, odds are you won't get it 100% right from the start. Layout interim policies with clear direction of strategic objectives. Let the workforce apply the new processes and strategies then enable them to contribute to a more formal policy, processes, and guidance based on best practices and lessons learned.

5. More rapid prototyping and experimentation. Abandon the JCIDS requirements approach of spending two years to perfect system requirements that will take a decade to develop, test, and produce, then operate and sustain for 30+ years. Focus on delivering minimum viable products early to assess performance, novel technologies and CONOPS, and user feedback. Use them to accelerate learning to shape the scope, requirements, and designs of capabilities. The Middle Tier of Acquisition and Software Acquisition Pathway embrace these approaches.

6. Rebalance risk holistically. The more time spent to burn down risk in requirements, budget, and acquisition, risk is transferred to the operational commands who are forced to use 30-year old legacy systems with decreasing performance and availability with increasing costs and vulnerabilities.

7. Empower the workforce. Recognize and reward those who embrace the values of speed and agility, active user engagements, and explore novel practices.

8. Tailor, tailor, tailor. A guiding principle of the new Adaptive Acquisition Framework is "tailoring in." DODI 5000.02 states: "MDAs/DAs will tailor program strategies and oversight, phase content, the timing and scope of decision reviews, and decision levels based on the characteristics of the capability being acquired (including complexity, risk, and urgency) to satisfy user requirements."

9. Be Courageous. Recognize the impact of your work and push back when you feel you are being sabotaged…even against your own leadership. Be respectful but clearly identify the impacts and limited value of the proposed action.

10. Demand Accountability. Sabotage often occurs by those that have no direct equity in the success of a program. When encountering this, propose that office become equally accountable in satisfying the program’s goals. Draft an MOA for that office to sign to that effect and invite them to key meetings to explain any delays.

“Our current system is too slow and too focused on acquiring systems not designed to address the most critical challenges we now face. This orientation leaves little incentive to design open systems that can rapidly incorporate cutting-edge technologies, creating longer-term challenges with obsolescence, interoperability, and cost effectiveness.... We will better align requirements, resourcing, and acquisition. The Department will reward rapid experimentation, acquisition, and fielding.”

- National Defense Strategy