How This WWII CIA Sabotage Manual Is Wrecking Your Team Meetings

In today's episode, you're gonna learn how a CIA sabotage manual from World War II is still ruining our team meetings today. Welcome to The Science of Teamwork, the show where we uncover the hidden mechanics behind how real teams succeed or fail. In every episode, we break down the stories, research, and psychology that explain why groups get stuck, why decisions stall, and why even so-called dream teams often underperform. I'm Mark Murphy, New York Times bestselling author of Team Players and founder of Leadership IQ, where I've spent more than 20 years training executives, boards, and every type of organization to build teams that actually work. In 1942, shortly after Pearl Harbor, the United States created the Office of Strategic Services. This would become the precursor to the CIA. It was essentially the United States' first major attempt to consolidate intelligence and espionage operations. It was led by a guy named General William Donovan. Wild Bill Donovan is what he was called. And he is a legend in the intelligence community. Now, amongst their thousands of insane exploits, crazy stuff, amazing stuff, one of the things they created was a sabotage manual, the purpose of which was simply to help citizens of enemy countries defeat the enemy countries. So essentially sympathizers. So imagine German citizens who don't like the Nazis. The OSS, precursor to the CIA, the Office of Strategic Services, created a manual to help German citizens simply, subtly defeat the Nazis. Okay, now how does a normal, just average German citizen during World War II defeat the Nazis. Well, they had— it's about 30-some-odd pages, this manual, and it had a wide variety of stuff. For example, if you work on cars, for example, after you repair a tire on a car, don't pump the tire slowly and cautiously. Pump it up really quickly so that the inner tube inside of the tire maybe will crease and it will wear out the tire faster. Simple things like that. Or if you work around lots of cars and Jeeps, Put some water, urine, or wine, or any other simple liquid you can get in reasonably large quantities that will dilute the gasoline to the point where no combustion will occur and the engine will basically seize up. Or if you happen to be a janitor, let's say, in a factory, and you can allow the oily and greasy waste to stack up a little bit, well, then maybe you could walk past that oily greasy waste and, you know, everybody smoked back then, I just kind of, you know, flick a lit cigarette onto it. And importantly, once you flick the lit cigarette onto it, um, don't be the first to report the fire. Uh, you know, ideally let it, let it burn for a little bit. So the sabotage manual was all sorts of stuff that a normal citizen could do that in small parts would help to stop the Nazi war machine. Now, okay, What if though you are just— you don't work in a factory, you don't work near cars, you can't pour a bottle of wine into a, you know, the engine of a Jeep. What can you do as just kind of a normal office worker? Well, in this sabotage manual, there is a chapter devoted to people who work in offices who just sit in normal meetings like we all do. How can you screw up a Nazi sympathizing organization if you are just a normal office worker who sits through meetings all day? Number of things you can do. Number 1: Insist on doing everything through channels. Never permit shortcuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions. Oh, make speeches. Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your points by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences. When possible, refer all matters to committees for Further study and consideration. Attempt to make the committees as large as possible, never less than 5 people. Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible. Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions. Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to reopen the question of the advisability of that decision. On and on and on it goes. Now, why am I sharing this with you? I'm sharing this with you because in every modern-day organization, we literally engage in the behaviors that one of the great masters of espionage to ever live, Wild Bill Donovan, as part of the leader of the OSS, the precursor to the CIA, identified as things, activities that will sabotage the Nazis. We literally, in modern-day organizations, engage in behaviors that were designed to sabotage the Nazis. That's why I'm sharing this stuff, because you, A, cannot make this stuff up, and B, it is madness that we are still engaging in this stuff every single day. Now, how do you fix this? Okay, there are two things you can do that are pretty simple and straightforward. Number one, the research is very clear on this, and I detail a lot of it in in Team Players, in my most recent book. Every great team has 5 roles, right? There's a stabilizer, they kind of keep you on track with your to-dos and all that. The achiever, they roll up their sleeves, do work. The harmonizer, they keep the group healthy, emotionally healthy, and with psychological safety. Trailblazer, they bring those out-of-the-box ideas. And then the director. The director is the person who is empowered to say, hey folks, burp, we've talked about this for an hour, time to move on. Or, you know what, we decided this at the last meeting, we're not reopening that discussion again. Or, you know what, we've been hearing stories about this for 10 minutes, nope, time to make a decision, we're not adding anything new to the conversation, time to move on, let's go. The director makes the tough decisions. Now, an interesting thing about this is that you can quickly tell if your team lacks a director simply by looking at the incidence, the frequency with which we say things like, that were on that sabotage manual. Or we say things like, well, let's, let's get some more options on this. Let's not, you know, let's not decide too quickly. Or, you know, let's take a few days to think about it. Let's, let's, you know, essentially postpone this decision a little bit. Let's not rush into anything. Or, you know, let's, let's get that other group, that other department over there. Let's study it a little bit. We don't want to decide too quickly. When I'm working with a board or an executive team or any group and I start to hear comments like this This is a clear indication that that team does not have a director who is empowered to say, "Erp, folks, guess what? We've debated this. We've already reached a conclusion. It is time to make a decision and move forward." This is clearly a group that is lacking somebody who has been empowered to have the courage to say, "Folks, we've decided this. We've debated this for long enough." What every group needs to do is every time you are about to go into a meeting, designate who your director is for that meeting. And interestingly, it does not have to be the boss. In fact, ironically, sometimes bosses— the executive ostensibly in charge of the group— is one of the worst offenders of those sabotage activities. They tell the most stories, they reopen debates most consistently. We need somebody who is empowered to say, folks, we've talked about this, we've debated it, we've hit the point where we're not adding anything new to the conversation. Time to make a decision and move forward. So designate a director for every single meeting. Name who that person is. Say explicitly, for this meeting, so-and-so, Jane, Bob, Frank, Sally, they are going to be the director. They're going to let us know when we are not adding anything new to the conversation, when it is time to poof, make a decision and move forward and empower them to do that. Trust them to make that decision. Now, in an ideal world, you will have— you will pick somebody who has a decent amount of inherent decisiveness. You do not want the first time out of the box to pick the person that, you know, is incapable of making decision or has a long history of waffling or postponing decisions. We don't want to start with that person. We want somebody who is unafraid to say, hey, Folks, we've debated this for long enough. If you do not have this person, meetings become painful because there is nobody who will say, hey, we are literally engaging in those sabotage activities that were designed to defeat the Nazis. We're literally doing that to ourselves. The other thing that I find insanely helpful is, and I do this with almost every group I work with, I will literally have them print out a couple, one or two pages from the sabotage manual and literally have it on the table during their meetings. Or, you know, everybody has a PDF version of it if we're doing this over Zoom or whatever. And it is a way to put this front and center and have somebody who is designated to call out, ideally your director, to say, hey folks, wait a minute, Um, uh, we're doing that thing, number 3 on the sabotage manual. Yeah, we're doing that again. You know, when possible, refer all matters to committees for further study. Attempt to make the committees as large as possible, never less than 5. We're doing that exact thing, folks. We're literally sabotaging ourselves like the Nazis. We should not be doing this. Sometimes we actually have to shame ourselves a little bit. We have to embarrass ourselves a little bit in as a reminder that, listen, We need to be better and more effective at making decisions in our meetings and not engaging in behaviors that were literally designed to sabotage the Nazis. There is no universe in which we should be willingly doing this to ourselves. Thanks for listening to The Science of Teamwork. If you want to go deeper into the ideas we explored today, check out my book, Team Players. It lays out a revolutionary research-backed system for building extraordinary teams, a system that will completely change how you assemble, lead, and transform the groups that matter most in your organization. Links to get the book are in the show notes or episode description. And if your organization wants to build teams that actually work, whether it's your executive team, board, project groups, or cross-functional squads, I'd love to help you. I train and speak with leaders around the world, and you can reach me directly at mark@leadershipiq.com. That's my personal email, or through leadershipiq.com. If you're enjoying the show, please follow the podcast and share it with someone who relies on great teams. Thanks again for joining me. I'll see you in the next episode.