The Simple Sabotage Field Manual is not long, but as soon as you read it, a lot of the behaviour in modern organizations starts to make a weird kind of sense. It’s both an amusing. historical artifact and a brutal diagnostic of dysfunction in any bureaucracy.

Originally produced by the Office of Strategic Services, the CIA’s predecessor, the manual was meant to inspire and equip ordinary people with low‑risk strategies and tactics for undermining enemy organizations from within during WWII. Its early pages cover the kinds of things you’d imagine in 1940s wartime such as how to start fires in warehouses, misdirect shipments and damage machinery without getting caught or attracting suspicion. The really amusing part comes further along, in the “organizational” section, which reads like a field guide to every terrible bureaucracy you’ve ever wanted to escape: insist on doing everything “through channels,” refer matters to oversized committees “for further study,” haggle endlessly over phrasing in minutes, and constantly urge “caution” and the need for more information.

What would most managers do if they realized that an incompetent employee’s habits of raising irrelevant issues, misfiling, and spreading rumours might not come from simple incompetence? What if all the bad meetings, poor performance, willingness to blame tools, and refusal to train new people was part of a strategy? Maybe they really don’t believe in those grievances they’ve brought forward, but are simply weaponizing the system and making it as inconvenient as possible in order to drown management in noise.

The only problem with the theory is that sustained, targeted incompetence requires intention, discipline, and effort. If things are done right, the saboteur will appear to be following important norms, such as following procedures, asking for clarity, and bringing up legitimate concerns, even as they drive everything toward delay and confusion. It can be very difficult to call out this kind of behaviour without looking paranoid.

One thing leaders can and should do, though, is recognize when their organization’s behaviour, or even their own, might be having “sabotage-like” effects. Some of the things to watch out for include meetings that never reach decisions, but defer to other meetings; approval processes with unnecessary steps; managers who give tasks to unprepared staff; lack of handover or training to successors; disappearing corporate memory,; and explanations that are deliberately obscure.

Of course, there are a few things leaders can do to combat this, but they all take work. Clarifying decision rights and timelines goes a long way, as does limiting the size and scope of committees, and establishing clear tracking mechanisms. It’s also crucial to be able to recognize the patterns that might present as prudence, due diligence, or even enthusiastic participation while masking something corrosive.

In Canada in particular, we’ve begun to recognize that we’re coming to the end of a long period of relative peace and  stability, where we had time to fill and could afford to use time to minimize risk. There’s nothing wrong with that in principle, but time is an important resource, and must be protected when things really matter. “Would I do this in war?” might not be a bad question to ask, every day.