Has your corporate culture been sabotaged using methods described by the pre-cursor to the CIA?
Just stumbled upon an excellent article on workplace sabotage that showcases how an old field manual from the Office of Strategic Services (pre-CIA), perfectly matches so many examples of today’s challenges in a corporate workplace.
In the article, it’s revealed that this former spy agency proposed to employ tactics to upend a productive workplace like:
- consensus building (“Never permit short-cuts be taken in order to expedite decisions”)
- risk aversion (“Advocate ‘caution’. Be ‘reasonable’ and urge your fellow conferees to be ‘reasonable’ and avoid haste which might result in embarrassments or difficulties later on.”)
- inefficiency (“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.”)
- distraction (“Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible”)
- frustration (“Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions.”)
These effective tactics at creating ineffectiveness are crisply articulated in a way that one can easily parse the underlying intent. It can be best categorized as not what an agent of chaos (read: not the same as the cliched marketing term: “agent of change”) may do ala the Joker Philosophy —but instead should be known as an ‘agent of status quo’ whose sole expertise is crafting a culture built upon indecision, status quo, lack of confidence, and coddling risk aversion vs. risk analysis. This last point is important.
No profitable company whom wishes to be known as a solid investment is going to be 100% risk agnostic — it’s all about understanding risk by acknowledging, analyzing, and creating an a balance of comfort between risk taking and steady state adherence.
Do many market-transforming companies get their foothold in the market by making a bet, being disruptive, and “going all in, come hell or high water”? Of course, many if not all do; indeed it’s easy to declare that it’s those initial bets that has solidified our current definition of “innovation” — the majority of said bets were done on the backbones of solid business plans and iterative approaches that many laypeople may find too “risk averse” in their perverse nu-definition of “innovation”.
The tactics described here are well-aligned not only with the traditional characteristics of unproductive employees who can drag down an entire team, department, product and/or organization, but also those organizations who would rather keep their eye on predictability rather than take calculated and acceptable risks.
So let’s think about risks…
Some examples of “risk” by disruptive companies that may have originally thought of as inevitable failures:
- Allowing stranger(s) to stay in your home by renting from you with little to no assurance that they won’t make off with your flat screen TV, otherwise known as AirBnB
- Allowing stranger(s) to ride in your own personal vehicle while you drive them wherever they want with little to no assurance that they won’t carjack you, otherwise known as Lyft and ride-share copycat Uber
- Getting up in the middle of your favorite TV show without being worried that your microwave popcorn would take longer than the commercial break, otherwise known as Tivo
- Trusting that technology and not a wrinkled map or the local gas station attendant would be your best bet to give you driving directions, otherwise known as GPS (and later Waze would also let you know that the direct GPS-navigated route wasn’t a good idea because traffic)
And there are plenty more examples, but the point is that these were all wild ideas that at the time likely seemed pretty easy to dismiss. And would like fail. And who likes to fail?! But instead of being 100% risk averse, these companies put a bet on an idea and ran with it.
Each one of them had failures within the above core model. But they iterated, learned from their mistakes, and fostered a culture where ‘fail fast’ or ‘continuous improvement’ was embraced and emboldened. In today’s technology world, these values have become the core tenets for successful innovative and growing companies.
Failing is never fun, but creating a culture where it is valuable to fail as long as you can learn from it and have a grasp on a pivot point upon which to iterate is how you can be successful at ‘failing’. If you are a part of a technology company with a culture that doesn’t feel correct, try to focus on these last points as that will naturally weed out these Agents of Status Quo.
