The Office of Strategic Services’ 1944 Simple Sabotage Manual, intended for advising civilians in occupied Europe about how to go about sabotaging Nazi operations without seeming to do so, is making the rounds again on social media due to its advice about using meetings to slow down organizational processes.
To wit:
The bulk of the manual actually involves technical advice for forms of genuine mechanical sabotage that would look just like simple failures or keep the saboteur from being suspected of wrongdoing, but this section (there’s some additional advice for managers about how to screw up their end of work processes without being detected) always amuses and yet also vaguely alarms contemporary readers, especially academics, because it seems like such an accurate description of actually-observed behaviors in faculty governance and in administrative meetings. (The alarm comes from the fact that this manual was written by the precursor to the CIA, which stimulates the vague feeling that maybe all that wasted time and frustration was done to us by an outside party. Fortunately just about everybody recognizes the implausible paranoia of that thought.)
The resemblance to the work of academic governance and administration is I think mostly a sign of how familiar bureaucratic forms and work processes were at mid-century to the manual’s authors (very much including the operations of the military during the war) and how consistent their frustrations have been. Everybody who has worked in an organization with more than ten members or so knows that at some point, the typical structures and workflow we use to coordinate labor or action at scale often make people feel unimportant (hence the numerous ways of redirecting deliberation through oneself in order to create a sensation of agency while incidentally impeding everyone else’s desire to expedite a decision), they deflect or diffuse responsibility for action, and subjugate individual judgment to an abstractly non-human procedural mechanism. The OSS’ advice here ends up feeling a bit like a Magritte painting: it might be sabotage, but who could know the difference?
The answer to this set of frustrations for some consultants and managerial leaders looking at academia has been that academic institutions need more formal hierarchy and they need to get faculty out of decision-making processes as much as possible. The clearest example of that kind of advocacy is William Bowen and Eugene Tobin’s Locus of Authority, which does its best to hide its fairly aggressive argument against faculty governance inside lethally ponderous prose—it feels a bit like it was intended to be an administrator’s samizdat intended to be passed around in plain sight while the faculty don’t catch on to what’s being advocated. (I think in actuality it’s just been ignored.) But the OSS manual as a kind of eerie joke about organizational culture works just as well in much more hierarchical organizations, including corporations. The only time we really escape it is when we’re working in small, ad hoc collaborations that have a clear purpose and where individuals feel known and seen by one another.
That said, are there ways to do faculty meetings so they feel a bit less like attending a convention of OSS saboteurs all trying to outdo one another? (Full disclosure: I am 100% certain that my local profile in our faculty meetings makes me look like I’ve memorized this section of the manual.) I think so.
I know my first suggestion is controversial because I’ve made it before at my old blog and got a lot of critical responses, but I think Robert’s Rules of Order or some close approximation of it is ultimately a bad way to run any meeting except a meeting that has a formal proposal on the floor that needs to be voted upon. And maybe not even then. Every context I’ve been in where Robert’s Rules are being used (not just Swarthmore faculty meetings but quite a few others), the group ends up spending more time trying to get straight how the rules work than it does in substantive discussion—and the rules tend to intensify the capacity of individual actors to completely gum up the entire deliberative process.
My second thought is that there’s generally a problem with speaking before a whole body of faculty and administrative colleagues one by one, in an order kept by someone coordinating the meeting. For many people, that simply makes it too hard to gauge the risks and significance of expressing a strong opinion. Even for those who aren’t concerned about provoking or antagonizing colleagues or administrators, the process tends to be necessarily ponderous—you want to speak in response to something being said, but by the time your name comes around on the list, the discussion is about something else and even if your original point is still germane or unsaid, it feels wrong to wrench it back to the previous thought. The format encourages speechifying and peacocking (again: I confess to both myself) but also it just generally it creates a bad match between time, content and decision-making. Only one person can hold the floor at a time, and in most institutions, faculty and administrators do not have a standing public forum that lets many views and arguments circulate freely in advance of a formal meeting. There are committees, whose deliberations are essentially private, and there are isolated clusters of faculty who may be in conversation with one another informally or in departmental meetings, but no opinions traverse the whole landscape in a continuous way. So the formal meeting is the one time to get it all out there, and listening to speakers in serial is not a great way to do that.
The OSS description usually wouldn’t apply to the kinds of conversations you have with friends or trusted colleagues, to small ad hoc meetings, to classroom discussions or seminars with guest speakers, and so on. You can’t do all the work of the whole deliberative body in those settings, if nothing else because constructing a structure for reporting conversations that were richly dialogic and emotionally situated is also really hard. I think though that this is what faculties and administrative leaders need at most institutions—an ongoing public forum that is asynchronous (and thus can have many people speaking at once, in effect) and many small meetings and conversations that are at least somewhat transparent to one another.
In the end, though, scale is the basic problem, and so far, bureaucracy seems to be the only organizational structure we know of to handle it. What the OSS manual describes is less a sad-trombone failing of people and culture and more like the beams and girders that hold up a building, or the pipes that carry water between floors. As long as you have the pipes, there’s always going to be the idiot who clogs them by flushing something that wasn’t meant to be flushed—but also they’re just going to have material limits as well as affordances that affect life in the building.