It’s my third meeting about an unimportant change to an internal product at the bank, there are eight people in the room, and not one of them is allowed to say yes. That was ten years of my life in banking technology. In a bank you can almost afford it. In a business of fifteen people, you can’t.
When one conversation turns into three meetings
If your team has grown, you might be sitting in that room right now. A decision that used to take a conversation now needs a meeting. Then a follow-up meeting. Then three people to agree. And by the time it’s approved, nobody remembers why it mattered.
Nobody planned this. Every step turned up with a good reason attached.
The Simple Sabotage Field Manual
In January 1944, the Office of Strategic Services, the wartime agency that came before the CIA, wrote a manual. It was called the Simple Sabotage Field Manual, and it taught ordinary people in occupied Europe how to slow the enemy down from the inside. Clerks. Managers. People sitting in meetings.
One whole section needs no tools at all. Just paperwork, committees, and people being very, very reasonable.
What it says, word for word
On meetings:
“Insist on doing everything through channels.”
“Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.”
“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.”
“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.”
The section for managers is worse:
“Multiply paper work in plausible ways.”
“Insist on perfect work in relatively unimportant products.”
“See that three people have to approve everything where one would do.”
“Hold conferences when there is more critical work to be done.”
That was written to cripple an enemy. You have probably sat in that meeting in the last week.
What it costs you
Every line on that list costs you twice. Once in the time it burns, and again in where the work ends up. When nobody can move without three signatures, the work sits and waits. And the one desk it can always wait on is yours.
One business I worked with had six hours a week of status update meetings. Every one of them had a good reason. We cut all of them, and accountability went up.
Another had 247 written processes. The team had stopped opening them eight weeks before I arrived, and every decision still went straight to the founder.
I’m a big believer in writing processes down. What the manual wants is paper that looks like work and changes nothing. That is what “multiply paper work in plausible ways” looks like from the inside. It looks like progress.
Nobody in your business needed persuading
The people who wrote the manual had one problem, and they admitted it in the manual itself: “Purposeful stupidity is contrary to human nature.” Getting a normal person to slow things down on purpose was hard. They had to be persuaded.
So the manual gave its saboteurs a shortcut. Find the mistakes that already happen in normal work, and make them a bit bigger.
Nobody in your business needed persuading. Someone got burned once, so now three people sign off. Someone missed an update, so now there’s another status meeting. A client complained, so now everything goes through a committee. Each fix made sense on the day. Stacked together, they’re the manual.
Nobody planted a saboteur in your business, which also means there’s nobody to catch. The fix is deleting things.
Three questions for your next meeting
- Could one person have decided this? If yes, give it to them and move on.
- Did we already decide this? If yes, it stays decided.
- Is this meeting happening instead of the work? If yes, end it and go do the work.
Back in that bank, any one of those three questions would have ended my third meeting. Bureaucracy arrives one good reason at a time, and it leaves the same way. Nothing to build, nothing to buy, nothing to hire.
So if a saboteur walked into your business tomorrow, how much would they need to change?
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