Olivia: Jackson, if you had to describe the modern office meeting in one word, what would it be? Jackson: Sabotage. Olivia: You're not wrong. In fact, you're more right than you know. According to our book today, many of our most hated corporate habits are literally copied from a WWII spy manual on how to destroy a company from within. Jackson: Hold on, what? You're telling me the reason my weekly status update feels like a soul-crushing waste of time is because it was designed by spies? What book is making this claim? Olivia: It’s from “Brave New Work” by Aaron Dignan. And Dignan isn't just some theorist; he's the founder of The Ready, a firm that goes into huge companies like GE and PepsiCo to fix these exact problems. He wrote this book because he saw the same patterns of dysfunction everywhere, and he traced them back to some shocking origins. Jackson: Okay, you have to tell me about this sabotage manual. This sounds too wild to be true, but also… it makes a scary amount of sense.

Olivia: It’s absolutely real. During World War II, the Office of Strategic Services—the precursor to the CIA—created something called the Simple Sabotage Field Manual. It was a guide for ordinary citizens in enemy territories on how to subtly disrupt and undermine their workplaces without getting caught. Jackson: So, what, like putting sugar in the gas tank of the company car? Olivia: Less dramatic, more insidious. The manual had a whole section on "General Interference with Organizations." And when you read the list, it's like a perfect description of modern corporate life. Dignan lists them in the book, and it's chilling. Jackson: Oh, I need to hear these. Hit me. Olivia: Okay, here are a few, verbatim from the 1944 manual. One: "Insist on doing everything through 'channels.' Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions." Jackson: Wow. That’s… that’s just standard operating procedure in most big companies. The amount of times I've been told 'you have to follow the process' when the process is clearly broken. Olivia: Exactly. Here’s another: "Make 'speeches.' Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your 'points' by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences." Jackson: Oh my god, that’s every all-hands meeting I’ve ever been in. The CEO tells a 20-minute story about his fishing trip to make a point about synergy. It’s sabotage! Olivia: It gets better. "Refer all matters to committees for 'further study and consideration.' Attempt to make the committees as large as possible—never less than five." And my personal favorite: "Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions." Jackson: I feel personally attacked. This is my entire work week. The endless wordsmithing on an email that three people will read. Dignan’s point is that we’ve accidentally built our companies on a foundation of self-destruction. Olivia: Precisely. He shares this incredible story he calls "The $3 Million Meeting." He's with a leadership team, and they're all complaining about their monthly strategy review. It's a huge, time-consuming affair. So he asks them to calculate the actual cost. Jackson: How do you even calculate that? Olivia: They did it right there. They added up the salaries of everyone in the room, the time spent preparing the decks, the time spent in pre-meetings to prepare for the main meeting. They calculated the cost of all the people who had to feed information up the chain for the presentations. Jackson: I’m almost afraid to ask what the number was. Olivia: The team leader did the math and just went pale. He looked at Dignan and said, "We are spending three million dollars to have this shitty meeting?!" Jackson: Three million dollars. For one recurring meeting. That’s not just inefficient, that’s a catastrophic failure of the system. Olivia: And that’s Dignan’s core argument. The way we work is broken. It’s not just annoying; it’s actively, financially, and emotionally draining us. We're stuck in a system that values the illusion of control over actual progress. We’re all participating in this simple sabotage, and we don’t even realize it. Jackson: Okay, so if our workplaces are basically running on a self-destruct sequence from the 1940s, what's the alternative? How do we escape this? Because right now, I'm ready to burn my expense reports and run for the hills.

Olivia: Well, that’s the hopeful part of the book. Dignan argues that a new type of organization is emerging, which he calls "Evolutionary Organizations." And they operate on two fundamentally different mindsets that are the complete opposite of the control-and-command sabotage model. Jackson: Okay, I’m listening. What are they? Olivia: The first is being People Positive. It’s the radical belief that people are not lazy, untrustworthy cogs in a machine. It’s the assumption that people are inherently creative, responsible, and want to do good work. You just have to create the conditions for them to do so. Jackson: That sounds nice, but it also sounds a bit idealistic. In the real world, don't you need rules and managers to keep people in line? Olivia: That’s the traditional view. The People Positive view is that if you treat people like they can’t be trusted, they’ll live down to your expectations. Dignan tells the story of FAVI, a French brass foundry. In the 80s, the new CEO, Jean-François Zobrist, came in and did something wild. Jackson: What did he do? Olivia: He got rid of all the time clocks. He got rid of all production quotas. He got rid of the central approval department for purchasing. He basically told the workers, "I trust you. You know how to do your jobs. You know what you need. Just do what’s right for the customer." Jackson: That sounds like a recipe for chaos. Did everyone just stop working and steal all the equipment? Olivia: The exact opposite happened. Productivity skyrocketed. Defects plummeted. They haven't shipped a late order in over twenty-five years. They became the dominant player in their market, exporting parts to China. Because they were trusted, the workers acted with a profound sense of ownership. That’s being People Positive in action. Jackson: Wow. Okay, so trusting people actually works. What’s the second mindset? Olivia: The second is being Complexity Conscious. This is the idea that organizations aren't simple, predictable machines. They're complex, living systems, like a rainforest or a city. You can't control a rainforest, you can only tend to it. You manage the conditions, not the individual trees. Jackson: That’s a great analogy. So instead of a manager telling everyone what to do, you create a healthy environment and let the team figure it out? Olivia: Exactly. The perfect example is Buurtzorg, a massive Dutch home healthcare organization. It has over fourteen thousand nurses, but its headquarters has fewer than fifty people. There are no managers in the traditional sense. Jackson: How is that even possible? Who tells the nurses where to go? Olivia: They tell themselves. They’re organized into small, self-managing teams of about 10 to 12 nurses. Each team is responsible for a specific neighborhood. They handle everything: patient care, scheduling, administration, even hiring new team members. They are given a purpose—help people live healthier, more autonomous lives—and then they are given the freedom to figure out the best way to achieve it. Jackson: And the results? Olivia: Better patient outcomes, higher job satisfaction for the nurses, and they’ve saved the Dutch healthcare system hundreds of millions of euros. They are consistently voted the best employer in the Netherlands. They are Complexity Conscious—the leaders don't pretend to have all the answers. They create a structure that allows the answers to emerge from the people closest to the work. Jackson: So, People Positive is about trust, and Complexity Conscious is about letting go of control. It’s a fundamental shift in how you view both people and the organization itself. Olivia: It is. And it’s a powerful antidote to the sabotage culture. Instead of rules that create bottlenecks, you have principles that guide good judgment. Instead of hierarchy that creates fear, you have transparency that creates trust. Jackson: This is all incredibly inspiring. But I have to ask the big question. How does a normal company, one that's not a French foundry or a Dutch nursing collective, actually start doing this? You can't just fire all the managers on a Monday morning and hope for the best.

Olivia: You are asking the exact right question, and it's the one Dignan spends the last part of the book on. His most critical point is this: you cannot install a new culture. It's impossible. Any leader who says "we're rolling out a new culture of innovation" is doomed to fail. Jackson: I've heard that speech before. It usually comes with posters and free mugs. Olivia: And it never works. Dignan says that's because culture is a shadow. You can't change the shadow directly; you have to move the object that's casting it. In an organization, the object is the system—the "Operating System" or OS. Jackson: The Operating System? Like for a computer? Olivia: Exactly like that. It’s the underlying set of practices and principles that dictate how everything works. He breaks it down into twelve domains on what he calls the OS Canvas. These are things like Authority (how we make decisions), Structure (how we team up), Information (how it flows), and Meetings (how we gather). Jackson: Ah, so it’s a diagnostic tool. It’s a way to map out your company’s current, maybe broken, system. Olivia: Precisely. It’s not a master plan. It’s a map for conversation. A team can get together, look at the canvas, and ask, "Where are our biggest tensions? Where are we feeling the most 'sabotage'?" Maybe it's in the endless approval process for resources. Maybe it's in the way information is hoarded. Jackson: So you identify the pain points in the system. Then what? Olivia: Then you run small, safe-to-try experiments to change the system. You don't try to boil the ocean. You start by stopping one useless meeting. You experiment with making one budget transparent. You empower one team to make a decision without asking for permission. This is what Dignan calls "continuous participatory change." Jackson: So it’s not a big, scary revolution. It’s a series of small, quiet evolutions. Olivia: Yes! And it has to be participatory. The best ideas for fixing the system come from the people living in it every day. He tells the story of Pixar. In 2013, after a string of massive hits, their president, Ed Catmull, realized the culture was getting stale. People weren't speaking up like they used to. Jackson: What did he do? Did he hire consultants and roll out a new set of values? Olivia: He did the opposite. They created something called "Notes Day." They shut down the entire studio for a day. No animation, no production. They just asked everyone, from janitors to top directors, one question: "What can we do better?" Jackson: A whole day? That must have cost a fortune. Olivia: It did, but the return was immense. They got over a thousand concrete proposals for how to improve everything from the creative process to the cafeteria food. Teams formed organically to champion the best ideas. It wasn't a top-down mandate; it was a bottom-up reinvention. It was a day of changing the system, together. Jackson: That’s the key, isn’t it? It’s not about leaders having a grand vision and forcing it on everyone. It’s about leaders creating the space for everyone else to have a vision for their own corner of the work. Olivia: You've nailed it. The leader's new job isn't to be the hero with all the answers. It's to be the host, the facilitator, the person who holds the space for the organization to become a better version of itself, continuously.

Jackson: So we've gone from realizing our jobs are accidentally based on a WWII sabotage manual, to seeing there's a better way based on trust and complexity, and finally understanding that the only way to get there is by empowering people to change the system themselves, one small experiment at a time. Olivia: Exactly. The big takeaway from Brave New Work isn't a set of rules, it's a question Dignan forces us to ask: "What would we do if we were starting with a blank sheet of paper?" And more importantly, "What's one small thing we can change today to get closer to that?" Jackson: It feels less overwhelming when you frame it like that. It’s not about a massive, terrifying transformation. It's about finding one "sabotage" practice in your own work week and proposing a small, brave alternative. Olivia: That’s the entire philosophy. It’s about progress, not perfection. And it starts with noticing. Notice the waste, notice the bureaucracy, but also notice the bright spots—the moments where a team just works, where trust flows freely. And then ask, "How can we have more of that?" Jackson: I love that. It’s a really hopeful message. It gives you a sense of agency, even if you’re not the CEO. You can still make a difference. Olivia: You absolutely can. So for everyone listening, we’d love to hear from you. What’s a "simple sabotage" you see at your work every day? Or even better, what’s a "bright spot," a small example of Brave New Work that’s already happening? Let us know on our social channels. Jackson: I can’t wait to read those. This has been fascinating, Olivia. Olivia: It’s a game-changing book. It really makes you see the world of work differently. Jackson: This is Aibrary, signing off.