How to Sabotage a Meeting

Ever get the sense that the meeting you are in is more about appearances than actions? Find that people keep on raising decision items that were already settled? Notice irrelevant issues dominate the agenda? Quite possibly an aspiring CIA operative is sabotaging your meeting.

Tom Clancy's The Hunt for Red October was published in 1984 and is one of my favourite novels and films (1990). It centres on the character of Jack Ryan, an irrepressible Irish Catholic — like Clancy himself — who is 'highly skilled, disciplined, honest, thoroughly professional' and only loses his cool when 'incompetent politicians or bureaucrats' get in his way.

Ryan is introduced to us as an analyst and occasional field operative in the CIA, an agency as famous as it is infamous the world over. Yet it was not always the case. Rewind about a hundred years ago, within the lifetime of my father if he were still with us, and intelligence gathering in the United States was an ad hoc affair with no central coordination, control, or direction. The US Army and US Navy had separate code-breaking departments — respectively the Signal Intelligence Service and OP-20-G.

This all changed when Australian-born British intelligence officer Charles Howard 'Dick' Ellis effectively wrote the blueprint for a centralised agency:

I was soon requested to draft a blueprint for an American intelligence agency, the equivalent of BSC [British Security Co-ordination] and based on these British wartime improvisations… detailed tables of organisation were disclosed to Washington… among these were the organisational tables that led to the birth of General William Donovan's OSS.

Dick Ellis

The OSS (Office of Strategic Services) was never as centralised as the CIA would later become, but after Pearl Harbor it took an ever growing role in supplying policy makers with estimates, key information, and reports. It also produced a field manual which, in keeping with my recent theme of meeting management, provided tips for how to sabotage a meeting.

The document reads like something out of Utopia — the Rob Sitch not Thomas More version — and is invaluable for anyone seeking to derail meetings. It is also a bit of fun to use as a form of management bingo, in which you can mark off the techniques used on your card when in meetings with people who, ironically, are not trying to sabotage the company but think this is a good way to run an effective meeting. A process that reminds me of the Dilbert cartoon:

If you want to read the full manual, it is available from the CIA website — OSS Simple Sabotage Field Manual.

General Interference with Organizations and Productions

The field manual breaks down the approach to sabotaging meetings into eight action items. I have highlighted the bingo terms / approaches for those wanting to play along in meetings, followed by the suggestions recommended in the OSS guide.

1. Do everything through channels: 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. Refer everything to committee: 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. Irrelevant issues: Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.
5. Maximise pedantry: Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions.
6. Always re-open topics: Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to re-open the question of the advisability of that decision.
7. Accentuate caution: 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. Worry about appearances: 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.