See an excerpt from a long article here (applied in a very narrow way in one country):
During World War II, the Office of Strategic Services — predecessor to the Central Intelligence Agency — produced a manual detailing methods of sabotage intended for the European Allied resistance in German-occupied areas to disrupt the German war machine. But this wasn’t about blowing up bridges.1 The Simple Sabotage Field Manual established disruption tactics to impede productivity and create inefficiencies in enemy organizations. These tactics were considered subversive acts of warfare.
Ironically, from rigid adherence to procedure to endless deliberation in committees, many of these tactics have become normalized and even embraced in modern workplaces. How did we come to unwittingly replicate this wartime sabotage directed at our enemies to proliferating it against ourselves?
I think clarity can be found in our relationship with time and risk. In times of peace and stability, we perceive we have more time to fill, our relationship with risk drops, and we make people do more things to ensure less risk. Then if war, conflict, or emergency hits, we abandon those same sabotage and bureaucratic tactics because “things really matter” and a lazy game becomes speed chess, on the clock.
What if we behaved as if time was always the most powerful weapons platform we have and every minute mattered, every day? What if we respected people’s time, lessened the toil, and asked, “Would I do this in war?” What if we treated our daily work as the “practice field” for war, rather than only scrambling to overcome all the malaise when it becomes “game critical”?
Or read a far punchier bullet list, if somewhat inaccurate, as applied to the EU.
Funniest of all, they know this — and the self-deifyingly “all-capable” pols are powerless to stop themselves!
Tears of laughter…