5 ms·

Sure, but at every level of the hierarchy, there is a boss to break the sabotage induced deadlock, and anyone acting up too much can always be fired/demoted by

Sure, but at every level of the hierarchy, there is a boss to break the sabotage induced deadlock, and anyone acting up too much can always be fired/demoted by that same boss. In looser structures like social movements or nascent labor organizations, it's hard for any individual/subset to wield enough authority to do either of those things. There are parallels with any organization (even families), but I think it's rather weak when applied to modern corporations.

AnthonyMouse 5y ago
> Sure, but at every level of the hierarchy, there is a boss to break the sabotage induced deadlock, and anyone acting up too much can always be fired/demoted by that same boss. This is why the sabotage relies on organizational politics and by the book pedantry. You have a corporate policy that was created by lawyers and HR for the solitary purpose of ass covering. It's so that if anyone violates it, they can point to the policy as an excuse to scapegoat them or have an independent pretext to punish wrongthinkers for things they're not legally or politically allowed to punish them for. If you insist on actually following that policy to the letter to the detriment of the organization, your boss is risking their own ass to put a stop to it, so most of them won't. And the policy itself comes from over their head, so they can't change it.
- dundarious 5y ago
  Who are the saboteurs in this analogy? Who are the people who are consciously (but secretly) trying to sabotage the organization/operations?
  - AnthonyMouse 5y ago
    "Saboteurs" is tongue in cheek. There might be some actual saboteurs in the world, but most people are doing these things out of incompetence or neuroses or personal advantage. Bob hates to work with X, but Bob's boss's boss got a kickback for signing a contract with X vendor, so now Bob is going to follow every policy to the letter on the X project until it fails or his request for reassignment goes through. Carol has OCD. You give her a policy book and she's going to read it cover to cover and create her own index to it and make citations to individual provisions whenever she sees anyone violating it, even if they're only violating the letter and not the spirit. Alice does the same thing but it's because she's an opportunist, so she only looks for policy violations as retaliation for not getting her way and people learn not to cross her.
    - dundarious 5y ago
      OK, my understanding is to take your comparison as more of an Office Space style critique of the modern corporation then.
      - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
        > to take your comparison as more of an Office Space style critique of the modern corporation then. ... Scarily accurate? Spot on? A sad but correct reading of how companies actually operate?
        dundarious 5y ago
        Yes, all of that, but also relatively trivial in comparison to the use of these tactics in operations like COINTELPRO. Almost everyone on HN works in an office (myself included), but I think it's a bit shallow and limiting (and ultimately dangerous) if the primary way we interact with such materials is to strip them of their actual context, and immediately apply them to our mundane individual experience, thinking things like, "yeah that's just like I told my boss, I was like, 'uhhh, this meeting could have been an email?... ;)'". (That's a caricature of their opinion, but it was funny to me, and still expresses what I mean about its relative shallowness).
  - lazide 5y ago
    In my experience (having worked as a peon then a manager, then a senior manager) at one of the companies talked about here in the past? These techniques aren’t effective because they’re clearly sabotage. They’re effective because they kill an organizations effectiveness AND often happen naturally, so by turning it up a notch you’ll throw even more wrenches into the works than normal - but fly under the radar. The whole strict hierarchy and breaking ties thing you’re talking about exists because all the things in this manual happen all the time ANYWAY, just not as often. And there are a number of ways to point fingers and hide/diffuse blame that happen all day everywhere anyway too, and work.
  - mcguire 5y ago
    In the specific case of the document, "citizen saboteurs" who were opposed to the Nazi regime, but who weren't in a position to, or didn't want to, take more active measures.

AnthonyMouse 5y ago

> Sure, but at every level of the hierarchy, there is a boss to break the sabotage induced deadlock, and anyone acting up too much can always be fired/demoted by that same boss. This is why the sabotage relies on organizational politics and by the book pedantry. You have a corporate policy that was created by lawyers and HR for the solitary purpose of ass covering. It's so that if anyone violates it, they can point to the policy as an excuse to scapegoat them or have an independent pretext to punish wrongthinkers for things they're not legally or politically allowed to punish them for. If you insist on actually following that policy to the letter to the detriment of the organization, your boss is risking their own ass to put a stop to it, so most of them won't. And the policy itself comes from over their head, so they can't change it.

dundarious 5y ago
Who are the saboteurs in this analogy? Who are the people who are consciously (but secretly) trying to sabotage the organization/operations?
- AnthonyMouse 5y ago
  "Saboteurs" is tongue in cheek. There might be some actual saboteurs in the world, but most people are doing these things out of incompetence or neuroses or personal advantage. Bob hates to work with X, but Bob's boss's boss got a kickback for signing a contract with X vendor, so now Bob is going to follow every policy to the letter on the X project until it fails or his request for reassignment goes through. Carol has OCD. You give her a policy book and she's going to read it cover to cover and create her own index to it and make citations to individual provisions whenever she sees anyone violating it, even if they're only violating the letter and not the spirit. Alice does the same thing but it's because she's an opportunist, so she only looks for policy violations as retaliation for not getting her way and people learn not to cross her.
  - dundarious 5y ago
    OK, my understanding is to take your comparison as more of an Office Space style critique of the modern corporation then.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
      > to take your comparison as more of an Office Space style critique of the modern corporation then. ... Scarily accurate? Spot on? A sad but correct reading of how companies actually operate?
      - dundarious 5y ago
        Yes, all of that, but also relatively trivial in comparison to the use of these tactics in operations like COINTELPRO. Almost everyone on HN works in an office (myself included), but I think it's a bit shallow and limiting (and ultimately dangerous) if the primary way we interact with such materials is to strip them of their actual context, and immediately apply them to our mundane individual experience, thinking things like, "yeah that's just like I told my boss, I was like, 'uhhh, this meeting could have been an email?... ;)'". (That's a caricature of their opinion, but it was funny to me, and still expresses what I mean about its relative shallowness).
- lazide 5y ago
  In my experience (having worked as a peon then a manager, then a senior manager) at one of the companies talked about here in the past? These techniques aren’t effective because they’re clearly sabotage. They’re effective because they kill an organizations effectiveness AND often happen naturally, so by turning it up a notch you’ll throw even more wrenches into the works than normal - but fly under the radar. The whole strict hierarchy and breaking ties thing you’re talking about exists because all the things in this manual happen all the time ANYWAY, just not as often. And there are a number of ways to point fingers and hide/diffuse blame that happen all day everywhere anyway too, and work.
- mcguire 5y ago
  In the specific case of the document, "citizen saboteurs" who were opposed to the Nazi regime, but who weren't in a position to, or didn't want to, take more active measures.